The chicken that greeted an early-morning train crew in Queens last week had been left behind by a straphanger the previous evening, the Daily News has learned.

The bird — which, as previously reported by the Daily News, took a subway out of service after it refused to leave a southbound train on the Astoria Line — had been on the train car all night when transit crews discovered it aboard a parked train early last Thursday morning.

The chicken — whose odyssey was first reported by The News — boarded the W train Wednesday evening, carried in the arms of a man who boarded the train from an elevated platform somewhere in northern Queens sometime between 9:30 p.m. and 10:30 p.m., according to two sources who viewed surveillance footage from the train. The man appeared on the footage t

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