Getting rekt in Wingspan by tucking

My friend and I play a lot of Wingspan online in between our Dune Imperium sessions. It's lots of fun, but I have never beaten him. The game almost always goes the same way: I try to work with the strategy my opening cards give me, some tucking cards come up I can't afford at the moment. he takes them, and is able to get a definitively game winning amount of points from exploiting them.

i have no complaints, he's beating me fair and square and I'm still having lots of fun, don't want to be considered whining about it, but I'm curious what counterplay to this is? I want to start giving him some competition but is it just a race to tuckable cards?