They fare infinitely better. Imagine the kind of traffic that you see around a large tree at dusk that birds use for sleeping around a major airport. The carnage would be beyond your wildest nightmares.
I think I didn't communicate clearly. What I meant to say is that I think birds fare as well when birds strike aircraft (jets, helicopters) as when aircraft strike other aircraft. There's a measurable difference between a 200g soft thing bumping into another one, as opposed to a multi-ton rigid structure full of high explosive liquid and fast moving things having a little tiff.
I get what your saying about the organized chaos, but the risk slight accidental impact imposes isn't even close.
The whole trick is in avoiding the collisions in the first place which birds manage with considerable grace, even when there are a lot of them. I live in the middle of a bird sanctuary and there are on a good day a few million of them nearby and to see them take off in enormous flocks without any mishap or central control is extremely impressive.
The obvious fact is that we engineer our aircraft (especially choppers) in a way that is totally contrary to the principles of flight (which penalizes weight and power-to-weight even more) but it's a direct function of the fact that we'd like to be on board as well and we're a lot heavier than the heaviest birds. All that machinery is our technological workaround for not having wings and it comes at a significant price: that as soon as anything at all goes wrong we are painfully reminded that the sky is not our natural element. So there are very few ways that we manage to recover from any mid-air collision and the speed for fixed wing aircraft and the potential energy of rotary craft pretty much guarantees destruction and death or at a minimum serious injury of all occupants in case of accidents.
There may be some way in which we could re-visit flying designed from the ground up with recovery from collision and failure of (sub)systems in mind. I wonder what form it would take.
we are painfully reminded that the sky is not our natural element.
Isn't that also something else? There are evolutionary characteristics in bird brains that enable them to react the way they need to survive in the air? Even with the best machine learning algorithms, would we really be able to replicate that intelligence within a single generation? Maybe, stranger things have happened, but I doubt it. Certainly, I doubt human pilots would be able to replicate it, I think AI would have a better chance, but that's still scary.
I saw a 3D flocking demo in the 80's that looked eerily natural. Mindblowing at the time and the whole thing revolved around only 4 parameters and some simple formulas. Emergent behaviour at its finest so replicating that would not be all that hard. Getting the machinery in place to obey the signals is a lot harder.
