The Mayor flies into eternity

Karen Finnegan never expected the bird to have such an impact.

Before The Mayor became the unofficial mascot of Beacon, the red hen was a scruffy, squawky stray who had a thing for laying eggs in people's yards. In the spring of 2020, about two months after the pandemic shutdown began, the hen was seen wandering around Harbor Hill Court and Davies Avenue. Neighbors dubbed her the Beacon Hood Chicken.

Finnegan already owned chickens, so when she read about the stray online, she drove from her home in Fishkill to rescue it from what surely would have been a lonely, and perhaps short, life on the streets. Once home with her new family, the hen carried herself like she owned the place. She was renamed The Mayor.

She would peck at the back door to be let inside. Unintimidated by larger members of the animal kingdom, she drank water from the same dish as the three family dogs.

Once, when The Mayor slipped into Finnegan's house, she hopped up on the kitchen table and took a sip from her husband Kevin's coffee. Exasperated, he could only muster: "There's a chicken in here. I need a new coffee."

That's the confident, outspoken bird that Finnegan recalled on Tuesday (March 25), a week after The Mayor died quietly in her arms. Finnegan said she doesn't suspect bird flu. "I think it was just old age," perhaps exacerbated by fright from an encounter with a fox, she said. "Before anyone else says it, she was no spring chicken and she was a good egg," Finnegan wrote on Facebook. The Mayor was about 6 years old, an average lifespan for a backyard fowl.

After adopting the chicken, Finnegan leaned into The Mayor's unique character, livestreaming the hen's bedtime routine on Facebook. "She was such a funny little animal," Finnegan said. "She was making me laugh, and I wanted to spread that. She was a little bit of joy in a very dark period" of the pandemic.

Things snowballed after Halloween in 2020. Desperate to maintain a semblance of normalcy, volunteers collected donations and cleaned out the candy shelves at Walmart so The Mayor - wearing a pink tutu donated by a Beacon seamstress and wheeled in a stroller - could deliver treats to more than 100 houses. The exercise was repeated, only larger, at Christmas and Valentine's Day.

By 2021 The Mayor had become a celebrity, attracting a crowd everywhere she went. That spring she met Marc Molinaro, then the Dutchess County executive and later elected to Congress, who proclaimed her the county's Poultry Laureate. Drivers would slow down to say hello when Finnegan walked The Mayor down Main Street. In 2023, the hen threw out the first pitch at a Hudson Valley Renegades baseball game.

Something else was happening, too. Assuming The Mayor's persona, Finnegan's voice became amplified. Online and in person, she began to comment on the cultural changes she saw happening during the pandemic, often with a biting sarcasm that she might not have used before.

"The Mayor led the charge," said Alexandra Devin, whose 6-year-old daughter, Madelein, participated in a women's march with the chicken and 100 other humans at Memorial Park in 2021. "She was like the face of what Karen wanted to put out into the world."

When COVID-19 vaccines were introduced in December 2020, The Mayor and Finnegan, who has an immune-compromised child, hand-delivered cards congratulating people who took the shots. Inevitably, they were criticized by those opposed to the vaccines or the masks that were still commonplace.

The Mayor "was able to be political and funny," Finnegan said. If things got too heated, she would remind detractors to "stop arguing with a chicken, jackass."

Finnegan also has four children who identify as queer - "I have an L, a G and a B; I don't have a T," she said. In 2022, she founded Defense of Democracy with Laura Leigh Abby, who co-owned a Beacon fitness studio. The organization mobilized around school board elections in Wappingers Falls, opposing candidates endorsed by a conse...