At the main entrance to Green-Wood Cemetery at 25th Street and Fifth Avenue, you can hardly hear yourself think for the sound of the parrots. In the late 1960s, the urban legend goes, a crate of Argentinian long-tailed green parrots, known as Quaker Parrots, cracks open like an egg and the birds escape, eventually to make their way to the 1861 monumental brownstone arch built by Richard Upjohn, the builder of lower Manhattan’s Trinity Church.
Here, at the leeward side, because even on the warmest days there is a New York Harbor breeze, and in winter, Arctic at times, the parrots have made their nest out of the wind. In recent years, during renovation, the nests were destroyed and for a season they made do elsewhere before moving back, in exactly the same place they’ve been for decades, out of the wind.
I confess to a touch of Schadenfraude when, during the racket of the birds at 10 a.m. Saturday, the last day of Week Eight, the security guard waves M and I through to join the Sketch Walking Tour. I can’t be sure if he is the same guy who stopped me (See Running for Your Life: Week Four) on my first trip to the entrance. Now, though, I see that there might be a reason for him to be a bit grouchy (if not trigger happy). There must be dozens of birds up there, squawking like there’s no tomorrow.
