This past Saturday, September 15th, the 2nd 6th annual Wilsonville Parakeet Race took place in the old Albertson’s parking lot. 

The event consisted of tortellini eating, a potluck of sorts, bird racing, and a Ninja blender raffle. Ethan Gail, an 11th grader,  was the mastermind of the event and the trainer of the 5-time reigning champion Arnold.

In coming up with the idea, Ethan Gail took inspiration from the Instagram profile, “True Wagner,” who creates fake event posters and posters that offer up fake services like flute lessons.

Ethan publicized the event through the creation of original posters that he designed on google docs. Gail said, “Everywhere in Wilsonville. I put up 20 signs in public places like such as the Villebois mailboxes and I put them up at 7-11.”

He also delegated the posting of various event updates on Reddit and the Wilsonville community page on Facebook to Oliver Hardt, also a Junior and a co-writer of this article. “The posters were originally posted by a user on the r/portland subreddit and started to gain numerous upvotes. It was then, that I posted a photo of the original event and an explanation of why the original event was canceled, along with info about the new date for the race”. Oliver’s post gained over 1,000 upvotes and 600 comments full of speculations on what the event was, who Tyler is, and offers to be security for the event.

When asked about the steps leading up to the event, Ethan explained that there was an original race that was rescheduled, so he decided to make a new poster. Ethan said it was rescheduled because “Tyler was spotted around the Safeway parking lot, and Arnold’s owner and handler didn’t feel comfortable having him near Tyler considering he wields a karambit (a Southeast Asian curved knife).”

The turnout for the event was better than Ethan expected, with close to 50 random people coming out to find out what race was going to be “I expected 10-20 people, but it was quite a lot more than that, probably close to 50 people at least that I didn’t know.” Although no parakeets showed up, Pinky Tuscadero, a parakeet-chicken mix was brought to the event by its handler. Being the only bird at the race, Pinky was crowned champion by default, as Arnold failed to be in attendance.

Ethan has other events planned for the future when asked, he said: “Yeah, I am gonna keep that confidential as I would hate to expose future plans for events as fakes before you all to waste your time to attend.” However, he did disclose to us that the next parakeet race will be taking place next year and will include a chicken wire race course, as the absence of a closed race was a big flaw in the original design and may have deterred potential participants. All in all, the race was a big success and it’s safe to say that next year will be even better.