It seems to accomplish this by turning off the pigment producing ability of the growing feather in a somewhat random pattern. In fact, as some cocks birds age, the instability of almond allows more and more normal pigment production. This can reach limits that make some older almond cocks hard to distinquish as actually being almond. Check the third photo above. There's one other thing about almond that you should understand.
Many people believe only the first bird in the photos above is an almond.
Unfortunately, it's not that simple. In this article, we are going to discuss almond, and its various alleles. Heck, I can almost hear the comments. Actually, I'm not - well, not more than a smidgeon. Rather than worrying about exactly what goes on inside a pigeon's cells, let's simply consider the whole thing a closed system.