Chicks a lot smaller than usual?

ella2025

Songster
Apr 24, 2025
268
361
136
Massachusetts
Here are :
red, a rir and the smallest of the group. Her featering has always been extremely slow for some reason. Even at 9 weeks and 3 days she still looks like she should be 5 weeks old. Still barely any tail and patchy looking.
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Olive, an olive egger labeled as a black sex link.
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Amber, an amberlinks. She is the biggest and plumpest of the 4.
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And Ebony, a black sex link.
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All 4 chicks are female and purchased at tractor supply. They were about a week old by the time of purchase and I estimated their birthday to be June 18, which makes them 9 weeks old. As you might have noticed in the photos, they are very small. I have tiny hands too.I never weighed any of the chicks I've raised, but they just feel a heck of a lot smaller than the 2 batches of chicks I raised in April. All my chicks were raised on nutrena naturewise chick starter. The only difference I can think of is these 4 chicks were fully living outside by 3 weeks old because there was good warm weather. The April chicks had to stay inside until 8-10 weeks old because I was stupid and started building the coop way too late. Here are some of the April chicks in comparison:

Bippy the barred rock at approximately 10 weeks (I tried to get a photo with my hand for comparison purposes. She was plump.)
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Carlos the silkie bantam rooster at 8 weeks (about the same size as Red from what I can see)
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Is there something wrong with my chicks? Are they just much skinnier and tinier because they had more room to move at a younger age or is something horribly wrong?
 

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They all look quite healthy, so I doubt anything is wrong.

I just bought 4 bantams from Rural King just over a week ago. In theory, they should have been about the same age as my first bantams were when I got them from TSC at the end of July.

But they aren't. They're smaller. They're growing and healthy, but they're still noticeably smaller at the same ages.

So I think you're probably good. ☺️
 
My first thought was bantams.
Sizes vary a lot. My smallest bantams are only 500 grams. The big bantams probably 1.5 kg.
This is reassuring. I haven't been worried about mine necessarily, because they've been eating, drinking, and all that good stuff just fine from the beginning. I guess I was just surprised by the size differences.
 

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