Trauma, heartbreak and letdowns are things we all experience, regardless of your background, ethnicity or where you come from. Often, people dealing with pain are taught to directly address the problem. For writer Christian Cooper, developing a pleasant distraction in nature that forces him to be present, is healing and freeing. He shared with me the many ways in which birding has been an outlet for nearly all his life.
"I started birding when I was about 10. I knew I was gay when I was about five. That was a hard place to be back in the 1970s," he said on "Salon Talks." "One of the things that birding does is that it gets you outside of yourself. That was important to me as a kid when I was a queer, nerdy, closeted kid."
