I like to think of myself as fairly knowledgeable about chicken behavior, and so it was with some surprise that I walked out to the barn late this summer to find that one of the hens had removed herself from the flock and taken up residence in an old abandoned cat litter bin. The bin was the type with a large plastic hood and thus made a nice chicken-sized cave. Still, there was no denying that this was odd behavior, even for a chicken.

The bird in question was a brown and black Araucana who, like a number of other hens over the years, had shifted status from farm animal to pet and was living out her days as she pleased. When such birds grow old, I generally find that, one day, they just don’t return with the rest of the flock when the birds come in for the evening from foraging in the front pasture. Occasionally, though, these old hens withdraw to some private corner of the barn for their final few days, and death finds them there. Which is what I thought was happening with this bird.

And so I began taking time each day to tend to my little chicken hospice. Each morning I set food and water by the mouth of the cat litter bin, and each morning I stared in at my dying Araucana, and each morning she stared right back at me, and blinked. This went on for some time. Weeks, actually.

I’d like to say that I never grew impatient, but of course I did, and then I’d feel guilty for feeling impatient and arrive the next morning just as attentive as ever. And the hen would stare out at me from her cat litter bin cave, and blink.

By the last week of August I began to wonder if I was destined to live the rest of the year playing servant to a dying hen, but things did change that week, as such things do. I walked out to the barn and there was my Araucana standing right in front of the pigs’ pen, surrounded by 11 just-hatched chicks. And if you’d have told me right then that the maple tree in the front yard had just done a cartwheel, I wouldn’t have been any more surprised.

As any modern farmer will tell you, chicks don’t come from hens. They come in the mail. You place an order with the hatchery of your choice, and then one morning the phone rings around 7 a.m. and it’s Phyllis up at the post office: “Your chicks are here.” Sometimes, you can hear them cheeping in the background.

My black and brown Araucana had come into the world in just this way: produced in an incubator in Iowa, and then raised to adulthood under a heat lamp in my barn in Harvard. And so I couldn’t help but wonder: how did she know how to hatch her own chicks?

We humans, of course, place a high value on intelligence, it being one of our better characteristics, but if you spend enough time with sheep and chickens you can develop a solid respect for the power of instinct as well. Instinct saves time. It skips that whole lengthy business of running the stimulus up and down various cognitive alleyways until a response emerges, which is a definite advantage in many situations. See the fox: run to the henhouse. No need to test out alternative hypotheses there.

So instinct, I have to believe, is what enabled my modern hen to perform this uncommonly behind-the-times act of producing her own chicks. Instinct, and of course the errant young cockerel who arrived, by mistake, in the middle of the last group of pullets that I picked up at the post office.

My Araucana has proved to be not just an instinctive incubator, but a fearsome mother as well, and when the chicks were young we couldn’t get within three feet of them without her charging right at our ankles, beak thrust out like a spear. She now has 11 healthy teenaged chickens on her hands, and I have to report that they all do exactly what she tells them. Remarkable.

With one meaning-filled cluck she can get them all to go outside the barn or all to come in, and for many weeks she used her authority to get her brood to return to the cat litter bin to sleep each night. Eventually, however, even she admitted that things were getting overcrowded in there, and now when I head outside in the evening to close up the barn, I find 11 young Araucanas roosting obediently along the top board of the pigs’ pen as their mother presides from her post at the top of the gate. I find it a peaceful scene indeed, and am glad, to be honest, of this little reminder each day that I don’t always know what I’m going to find when I open the door to the barn.

Andy Perkins lives on Bolton Road with her husband, their children, assorted farm animals, and 11 teenaged Araucana chickens.