I found the official guide to be a lot easier:

I tried the one bird method about 50 times, and never managed the magical domino of destruction the video shows. I tried the two bird method and got 168k in three tries.

Same here. My first one-bird success only got me 96,890.

Thanks for this strategy.

Came up with the same strategy myself.

Lol, nice.

I played as suggested above, getting two stars regardless of whether I used two or three birds. Firing the red bird against the TNT like always, everything fell down, by pure luck. One bird; 87,300.

I did this by accident and still didn’t have enough points for three stars. Curse my luck.