A city in Georgia wanted to build a 62-foot chicken topiary, but it's cost so much they've given up and are left with the hulking metal frame of a giant bird

• A city in Georgia has been left with a 62-foot steel chicken frame after scrapping a landmark topiary.
• The chicken was supposed to attract tourists, and work started on the big bird in 2019.

A small city's plans for a giant chicken topiary had its wings clipped on Monday after local leaders decided expenses had run too high.

Now, they're left with a massive 62-foot-tall steel skeleton of a bird.

The city council in Fitzgerald, Georgia voted on Monday to axe further work on the topiary, which residents have dubbed "the Big Chicken," The Washington Post reported.

The colossal bird was meant to attract tourists in Fitzgerald, a city of 9,000 where wild Burmese chickens are a common sight.

"They want to see chickens, so we're going to show them a chicken," then-Mayor Jim Puckett told the Associated Press when the city agreed to construct the topiary in 2019.

Had it been completed, the Fitzgerald topiary would have become the largest chicken-related monument in the state, ousting a 56-foot tall chicken sign at a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Marietta.

Construction of the Fitzgerald chicken began in 2019, with initial funding of $150,000. The idea was to install a bed-and-breakfast space within the topiary, where tourists could stay the night among the greenery.

But by 2021, the topiary was still unfinished, and had cost the city $300,000, The Post reported. The frame, however, had been mostly completed, yielding a towering metal bird along one of the city's main roads.

"This thing just was not being finished. And it just became this albatross," Fitzgerald Mayor Jason Holt told the outlet.

The city council voted on Monday to keep the steel chicken frame, but not as a topiary. They plan to build a fence around the giant chicken frame, add park benches and picnic tables nearby, and plant grass around the bird so it looks like it's sitting in a nest, per The Post.

Joe Kyte, the sculptor who built the chicken frame, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider sent outside regular business hours.