The miracle of hatch

Down at the bottom of the garden, the chickens are enjoying a rare bout of good weather. The ex-battery hens are growing feathers well (see post from April 19th for story - I can't work out how to link to it), and our old hen Molly is getting ready for this year's batch of chicks.
Molly is a Light Sussex, an old-fashioned breed of chicken with a strong tendency to go broody - that means that once a year she has a hormone surge which makes her want to sit and incubate a clutch of eggs, rather than lay them. For commercial reasons, most modern breeds don't go broody very much, and Molly is our only one who does this; which is just as well. However, we don't have a cockerel, which means that Molly could sit on eggs till kingdom come, and nothing would hatch, so each year I get hold of some fertile eggs from somewhere, and let her hatch them out. This year, I looked on ebay, and was amazed to see that loads of entrepeneurs are offering clutches of hatching eggs. So I bought her eight Light Sussex eggs, and she's been sitting peacefully on them, thinking eggy thoughts, or possibly no thoughts, for the last three weeks.
The eggs are due to hatch tomorrow, so I went and looked at them today. I love the day before the eggs hatch. You look at an egg, just like any egg you might get in the supermarket - these are a slightly pink cream in colour - and see a tiny crack at one end of the egg. If you hold the egg to your ear, you can feel vibrations as the chick shifts around inside it, and hear cheeping as the chick breathes the air within the membrane that protects it. I find the incongrueity of an ordinary-looking egg, which yet is clearly alive, to be endlessly fascinating. Molly sits above them, her wings curved a little away from her body, and talks to her eggs, little clucks and grunts under her breath, tender little noises that she only makes just before the eggs hatch and in the first few days of the chicks' lives.
Tomorrow, the chicks will hatch out; it takes them hours (you can't help more than a little, it's dangerous for them) - gradually they peck a hole in one end of the egg, and their little beaks poke through the hole; then they enlarge the window and make a crack along the side of the egg; then, slowly, their shoulders wrench the two halves of the egg apart, and out they come, wet and soggy like tiny dogs that have been left out in the rain; and then they dry out, over the next few hours, and look like little fluffy chicks. Aaah. I'll try to post some pictures tomorrow, if I get round to it.