Photo-Essay: Angels, Accordions, and Wild Parrots

Each October, a few weeks before Halloween, Green-Wood Cemetery hosts "Angels and Accordions," a haunting musical tour of some of the more storied monuments in "The Sacred City of the Dead," Brooklyn's permanent home to some 500,000 souls. The combination of ethereal music accompanying white-garbed angels perched in trees, floating in ponds, or dancing upon tombs, is magical. When you add the parrots, the experience borders on the metaphysical.

Enjoy, then, this unlikely confluence of angels, accordions, and wild parrots! (click on any photo for an enlarged view; all photos by Steve Baldwin)


Hark -- spoke the angel - what bird flies there?


A spectral starling?


A sepulchral sparrow?


No - a wild Quaker Parrot whose home is high in the heavenly loft!


But where is that parrot going? To whose tomb does he pay tribute?


None can parse the parrots' secret dialect.


Nor know the purpose of their graveside visits.


Some claim they land here for mere earthly food.


Claiming beech nuts dislodged by their sisters in the trees.


But the children know.


And the angel knows.


That when angels, accordions, and parrots converge,


Anything is possible.