A spokesman for the park said keepers had built an extended beach area on the island within their enclosure, which the birds “seemed to approve” of and had begun to “build volcano-shaped nests almost straight away”.<\/p>\n
They explained that raising the chicks in the first few weeks was “very much the responsibility of the whole colony” and said it had been “lovely” to see how the adults had gathered round to protect the little ones.<\/p>\n
With the population at the park reaching 25, staff were hopeful the “current breeding success” would continue as “the larger the group, the more likely they are to breed”, he added.<\/p>\n
When the chicks hatch they have grey-white down and a straight beak.<\/p>\n
They develop their pink colour over a few years as they eat foods rich in the carotenoid pigments that make some plants, algae and crustaceans red, orange, pink and yellow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A spokesman for the park said keepers had built an extended beach area on the island within their…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":143591,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":{"0":"post-143590","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-uk","10":"tag-united-kingdom","11":"tag-unitedkingdom","12":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143590"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143590\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/143591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}