I have noticed an appalling lack of knowledge in our culture about the hatching of eggs. In movies and online, they typically show the hatching creature bursting from the egg, all at once, with shards flying everywhere. This is my attempt to correct this problem. This pattern should hold true for any hard-shelled animal, so if a dragon, for instance, has a hard shell, it would also hatch in this way. If it had a leathery shell like other reptiles, hatching would look different, but then you wouldn't really have people carrying them around and trading them and all those things you do with dragon eggs.
Incubating a chick egg takes exactly three weeks, which is kind of amazing. Twenty-one days to grow from a microscopic cell to a walking, cheeping ball of cuteness... how come people can't do that? I suppose I should be grateful that nobody is planning on eating my nine-month incubated baby...
So, a few days before hatching, the chick breaks through the inner membrane and receives her first breath of air (I say her, because chicks are all female until proven guilty). You can hear tapping and cheeping, and see the egg rock back and forth.
A day or so later, the chick has managed to make a small hole in the fat end of the egg. We call this stage pipping:
After this, the chick takes a well deserved break. She may remain still for several hours. Finally she begins to make the hole larger. She's moving in a circle, chipping away piece at a time. We call this zipping:
After an hour or so, the chick has made a line all the way around the top part of the egg. Now she needs to struggle and thrash, moving around until she can squeeze through the hole she has made and emerge into the light:
She isn't very cute yet. She's a scrawny little thing resembling a dinosaur with proportionally huge legs. She doesn't walk very smoothly either. She stumbles around and tumbles over and looks very awkward. But give her a few hours to dry off, and practice using those legs. Then she'll fluff up and turn into that adorable fluff-ball we all recognize:
So, now you know. No more of this instantaneous bursting nonsense. Right?
