I remember reading something about bombers maybe during ww2. I think if fighters were chasing them, the bombers could escape because with their large wings, they could fly high and slow and turn inside them.
the analogy being - some birds might be set up for ground operations and chasing prey, others living in a different ecosystem with high altitude cruising over long distances.
Birds are more optimized than bats in some niches (like long-distance flight), but vertebrate evolution is very stuck into path dependency, and they are way far from the optimum on the things that matter for most animals like maneuverability and acceleration.
Four-winged birds dying up can easily be a complete accident, even more because two-winged birds were almost completely killed once too.
I remember reading something about bombers maybe during ww2. I think if fighters were chasing them, the bombers could escape because with their large wings, they could fly high and slow and turn inside them.
the analogy being - some birds might be set up for ground operations and chasing prey, others living in a different ecosystem with high altitude cruising over long distances.