[JangoSteve]

I noticed something was not being conserved with the blue bird when I first tried out Angry Birds. My strategy was usually to explode the bird just before collision to take advantage of the extra force.

My assumption was that the mechanism for splitting 1 bird into 3 birds was an internal explosion. This would introduce a large amount of energy into the system and account for increased velocity in the resulting birds, and thus the increased momentum.

Of course there is a way to test my theory (and I realize it probably has little basis in how the game was actually programmed, but it satisfied my mechanical engineer side to reconcile what I was seeing with reality). You could launch the blue bird such that it falls just to the right of a standing piece of wood and "explode" it just as it's right next to the wood. If it is, in fact, an explosion that propels all 3 new birds to the right, then there would be an equal force directed to the left, which should knock the piece of wood over without touching it.