Horseshoe Bay Beach is a crescent of pink sand on the south shore of Bermuda, in Southampton parish, closed at both ends by cliffs of cemented ice-age dune, with rock stacks standing out of the shallows, and its colour comes from the ground-up red shells of a reef animal the size of a pinhead, seen best at the waterline in the late afternoon when the ebbing tide has left the sand wet. Bermuda is not a coral island but a thin lid of limestone over a dead volcano, a seamount whose eruptions stopped roughly 30 million years ago, and the cliffs and outcrops framing the beach are aeolianite, dunes blown up from the shore in the ice ages and cemented into stone; the pink is from foraminifera, single-celled animals with red shells that live on the underside of the reef and wash ashore broken among the white grains of coral and shell, so that a handful scooped at the water's edge shows the red flecks. Weathered towers of dune limestone rise straight out of the shallows just offshore, breaking the swell and leaving calm pockets behind them for swimming, and the water climbs to 28 degrees by late August.
The main crescent fills with cruise passengers by midday, but the crowd stops where it ends, and around the headland to the east a string of small coves with the same pink sand are reached along the rocks or the path above, with a few people or none. In the cliffs above the beach nest the longtails, white-tailed tropicbirds that are the national bird, superb fliers and helpless on land, their legs set so far back that they cannot stand upright, which return in late February and court in wheeling pairs over the headlands through April. Humpbacks pass in March and April, seen from the south-shore cliffs, and taking sand off a Bermudian beach is illegal, though visitors are estimated to carry off three tonnes a year in bags. Horseshoe Bay is a beach with the reef ground into it, and the pink is the animals that lived there.