(dramatic thud) - The best kind of story is overcoming hardship.

- [Tom] Ranching is a very difficult task.

- [Will] She was just feeling lost.

- [Tiffany] I found myself asking over and over again, "Am I being brave or am I being stupid?"

(intriguing dramatic music) (shovel clacking) - It was almost unbelievable.

(intriguing dramatic music continues) (Tom imitates cattle calling) - If you don't try, no glory.

(dramatic thud) (birds chirping) (intriguing triumphant orchestral music) (keyboard clacking) (no audio) - This is more than just the story of a restaurant, (flames whooshing) this is a story of a family and a story about West Texas.

It's about a man who had a challenge, he was on the verge of failure, and he turned it into something that really worked.

I'm Pat Sharpe, I'm the restaurant critic at Texas Monthly, and I wrote a profile of the Perini Ranch Steakhouse.

Oh, yeah, this was fun to do.

I learned so much doing this story.

I'm retiring, and I've been with the magazine for 50 years.

The Perini Ranch Steakhouse has been around for 40 years, and I can't remember exactly when I first went out there, but, you know, 30 plus years ago.

So often when I'm writing about a restaurant, there really is not much of a story except the food, which is fine, but the great thing about the Perini Ranch Steakhouse is that there is a beginning, a middle, and an end.

So, as a writer, for me, it was just a dream.

(diners chattering) (mellow country music) - [Server] How's everything going?

- Well, the Perini Ranch Steakhouse is in Buffalo Gap, Texas, which is a tiny community, about 14 miles outside of Abilene; and the owners are Tom and Lisa Perini.

- Lisa.

- Serve you with my husband, Tom.

- And me, I'm Tom, but I've got a drink in my hand, (Lisa chucking) so I might give you... As a young man, I was living in Dallas and my father passed away.

(solemn intriguing orchestral music) And so, my mother called me and said, "You need to come home."

And when I got here and in this room, she said, "Your job for the family is to keep this 640 acres together."

And I said, "Yes, ma'am," but I had no idea what I was gonna do to keep it together.

And that's the rest of the story.

(wind whooshing) (Tom imitates cattle calling) (cattle mooing) Ranching is a very difficult task.

(intriguing orchestral music) (cattle mooing) We borrowed money, we borrowed money for the lease, we borrowed money for cattle.

- For years and years, it was nip and tuck.

Tom was really not a natural at running a ranch, but he was very good at being a cowboy cook.

- When we were 14, some of my friends would find maybe a case of beer someplace, and I would end up being the cook, and they'd be playing poker and drinking and stuff, and I enjoyed cooking.

- [Patricia] So he started catering parties that ranches would have.

(oil sizzling) - I'd cook for a thousand people.

- He was making fantastic steaks.

He knew what he was doing and he was good at it, as opposed to ranching where he didn't really know what he was doing, and it wasn't working out so well.

(cattle mooing) - I went to my mentor, Watt Matthews, and I said, "Watt, I cannot make this work."

And he told me, he said, "Tom, you can do more for the cattle industry by cooking it than by raising it."

And I said, "Yes, sir," and I opened the steakhouse.

(intriguing orchestral music) - Tom decided, what did he have to lose?

So in 1983, he converted an old hay barn into a restaurant on the property, he wrote a menu out in a Big Chief notebook and got some of the guys who had been cooking for him in the catering business to come in and cook in the steakhouse.

- I had this barn, it was a hay barn, and so I had to go in and pour a concrete floor and put a front on it.

Honestly, in those times, it was the cheapest way for me to get started.

And the character of the barn is part of this whole situation.

When you walk in, you go, "Oh my gosh, it's a joint, it is a Texas joint."

(diners laughing) But it's not like most steakhouses that you've been to.

- It's really easy to tell somebody who has never been to the Perini Ranch Steakhouse before because they'll be standing by their car in the parking lot, which is in a sea of giant pickups, and they'll be looking around and trying to find the steakhouse.

And what they don't realize is that it's really this little weathered building over on the side, that is the steakhouse.

- I don't want some shiny place with a big fancy sign.

Our way of cooking is very simple, it's the old-time way.

When I started this, I mean we were cooking everything on fire, and still do to this day.

- [Patricia] His seasoning is excellent; he's got little garlic, he's got salt and pepper, and he has some oregano, and I think that really ups the caliber of his steaks.

- We have big prime ribs that we cook whole, but then you have ribeyes and strips and filets; we represent certified Angus beef.

- The Perini Ranch Steakhouse is not solely about the steaks, they have a dish that they call Zucchini Perini, they've got a great mac and cheese, they have the Perini Martini garnished with a blue cheese-stuffed olive.

(intriguing country orchestral music) - But I'm gonna tell you, when you're in the food business and Pat Sharpe walks in the building, you better be puckering, because, I mean, she was tough.

- I told him that I thought probably he could up the seasoning on the steaks a little bit, and that he was putting too much cheese in the macaroni and cheese; and he took that to heart and he changed the recipes.

And the next time I had both of those things, they were really better.

(crew members chuckling) - But I will also tell you, Pat was the type of person that would help you, she is a good friend.

- Not only am I a great admirer of what they do just professionally, they've gotten to be good friends.

- [Tom] Huh?

(Lisa chattering indistinctly) (solemn country orchestral music) - A restaurant business is tough.

And, you know, if you go to a bank and say you wanna borrow money and open a restaurant, the banker kind of backs up, because most restaurants do not make it.

And in my case, I was fortunate enough to have a mother that believed what I was doing.

So when I couldn't make payroll, she'd give me the money.

(solemn country orchestral music continues) - 1995 was the year everything changed.

(mellow upbeat country rock music) Tom got an invitation from the James Beard Foundation to do a catered meal.

In the restaurant world, this is a sign that you've really arrived, so it was very important to him to do this.

It was gonna cost him more to do the dinner then he could possibly make on it, so he needed to have an additional source of income to make the trip worthwhile.

So he thought, "Okay, maybe I will let some of the publications in New York know about our mail-order stakes, and if they write a story about it, we'll get some orders, and we can make up the loss."

- We sent these tenderloins out, and four months later, a friend of mine from New York called me up early in the morning and she said, "Have you seen The New York Times?"

And I had to laugh, and I said, "You forget where I am."

(upbeat country rock music) - They chose Tom's tenderloin as the number one item on their Christmas mail-order story list.

It's huge.

- [Tom] At the same time, Governor Bush asked us to start catering for him.

- [Patricia] Catering at the Governor's mansion, there was just no better stamp of approval.

Those mesquite smoked tenderloins that he sells every year now by the thousands are one of the big cornerstones of the business.

(air whooshing) (crickets chirping) (signboard buzzing) (diners chattering) - If there's something that you really wanna do, you have to get in and fight for it and say, "This is what I'm gonna do, and this is how I'm gonna cook it, and this is how we'll do it."

Some of these things are very difficult, but if you don't try, no glory.

Well, welcome to the ranch.

- Thank you, thank you.

- Good to see you!

- My best friend, out to dinner.

Hi, I'm Lisa.

- I'm Abigail.

- Abigail, it's nice to meet you.

- Nice to meet you.

- When I look at what Tom and Lisa have done to take this place in the middle of nowhere and turn it into a destination, it took a lot of imagination and a lot of hard work and just getting up and going after it day after day after day, until it finally caught fire and succeeded; that to me is a real inspiration.

(mellow soulful country music) - [Tom] My mother said to keep this ranch together, and so we did.

(mellow soulful country music continues) (wind whooshing) (pages flapping) (solemn orchestral music) (birds chirping) - I think this story is about a lot of things, (gear clicking) but in large part about healing.

(solemn orchestral music continues) It's about this woman confronting her fears, grappling with trauma and with loneliness, and crisscrossing the country and just feeling completely and totally free.

(solemn orchestral music continues) My name's Will McCarthy, and I wrote "The Really, Really Big Year" for Texas Monthly.

(solemn orchestral music continues) (birds chirping) I found this story really just in a throwaway social media post on Facebook.

(mellow country orchestral music) Said, "Oh, this woman from South Texas just broke the record for most birds seen in the lower 48 in a year."

I didn't really know what that meant, didn't really think about birds like that deeply, or that there would be a record associated with seeing them.

I just ended up picking up the phone and calling the American Birding Association just being like, "Hey, is this real?

Do you keep track of this?

Is this an official thing that you award?"

They were like, "Yeah, she did it, Tiffany did it.

Yeah, she's great."

(intriguing orchestral music) Tiffany Kersten is a bird watching guide, she's also a very driven person.

She described her personality as addictive.

(air whooshing) (bow snapping) (arrow whooshing) (arrow thudding) She competed in archery, she once trained to be on "American Ninja Warrior."

But really, I was just like struck by her passion for birds.

- These hawks migrated all day and they're about to find a roost for the evening.

(birds calling) There's literally hundreds of them out here, hundreds and hundreds of Mississippi kites.

- [Will] Before writing this story, I didn't have any sort of deep understanding of birds or birding culture in general.

You know, I couldn't identify probably more than four or five species of these small, crazy, psychedelic little creatures.

Yeah, that changed quickly reporting this, for sure.

- [Tiffany] I started birding when I was 12, took a intro birding class with my mom at a local nature center in Wisconsin, and we saw the field of 2,000 sandhill cranes displaying and calling.

So that was my spark bird, and I've been a birder ever since that day.

- She got a degree in Wildlife Ecology, she worked on various bird projects in Hawaii and in the Northeast, and then eventually, she got a job in South Texas and ended up moving there for that.

- I was able to make my hobby into my career, and so, I get to do the thing that I enjoy the most in the world every single day and get paid for it.

(wings flapping) (intriguing orchestral music) - I started getting the story, and then that's kind of when I figured out that there was a lot more to this than just counting birds.

Tiffany was a victim of sexual assault.

- So I was assaulted by my archery coach in 2018, went through a very, very rough period of time, six months, where I was basically borderline suicidal, definitely in a really, really low spot.

I had been managing a nature center, and then COVID hit, I guess I got bored and bought a house.

As soon as I closed on my house, I was like, "What did I do?"

It was just me and my dog at the time, and almost instant regret.

And then I lost my job, (melancholy music) and I was now a single unemployed homeowner in the middle of a global pandemic, and it just didn't feel like life could get much worse.

(melancholy music continues) - [Will] She was sort of grappling with those series of challenges and just feeling lost.

- [Tiffany] I was in one of the lowest spots in my life in fall of 2020, so I did the only thing that I knew I could do the next day to start making money, which was guiding.

(wings flapping) - At some point in those months when she was sort of leading these sporadic birdwatching trips, she encountered this guy who was a friend of hers, but also a client who said, "Hey, you know, you have this time off.

Have you considered doing a Big Year?"

(cinematic dramatic music) A Big Year is the birdwatching term for trying to find or see as many species of bird within a single calendar year.

(cinematic dramatic music continues) - He was the first person to put kind of a bug in my ear about it, and I laughed it off, I said, "That's ridiculous.

I have no savings, I own a house, I have a dog, I'm in my mid-30s, I need to get my life together."

- Then her mentality slowly started to shift.

She did recognize that her life was sort of disorganized and that if there ever was a time to commit to doing a Big Year that this might be the time to do it.

- Something in me just kind of snapped, and I pulled over on the side of the road, and I did a little story on my Instagram and my Facebook, and, you know, I said, "I don't know what life has in store for me, but, effective immediately, and until life demands otherwise, I am doing a Big Year."

Yeah, it was this kind of scary, but freeing moment.

(intriguing dramatic music) - So in February, 2021, Tiffany set off from Texas to go see as many birds as she could.

(intriguing dramatic music continues) Doing a Big Year is different than your standard fare birdwatching, it's not just going out for an afternoon and seeing what you happen to see.

Everything has to be meticulously planned out as you only have a year to do it, and these birds are obviously spread out across the entire country.

- So efficiency is important.

I did a lower 48 states figure, but I went to 30 states.

I focused on the areas of the highest bird concentration, started in Florida, went to California, and then came and slept in Texas.

And so, that's just kind of representative of how much you travel.

(liftgate thudding) (intriguing orchestral music) Estimated, I drove 49,000 miles.

(intriguing orchestral music continues) (liftgate thudding) I would get notification of a rare bird, and I would drive 10 minutes away to the McAllen Airport and be on the next flight out.

My goal was to see 700 species and have all these experiences along the way.

And something about 12 or 13 people before me had seen 700 species in the lower 48 states in the years.

(tense orchestral music) (thunder rumbling) - But it pretty quickly became clear to her that things were not gonna be smooth sailing all the way.

Camping by herself and being out in the world by herself, I think that was challenging for her, and she was also really battling these fears and this trauma from her sexual assault.

You know, she describes out on some park stop and there was two guys near a car smoking a cigarette, and she had a panic attack.

(melancholy music) She was just sort of grappling with feeling afraid.

(melancholy music continues) Beyond my own interviews with Tiffany, there was also a journal, like an online blog chronicling the bird she'd seen, but also just her emotions and experiences throughout the day.

You kind of see her doubting herself and you see her fears, and you can kind of see her transforming in real-time.

I lean on that a lot in writing this story.

- During my Big Year, I truly did a few times wonder if I would make it through alive.

We, as women, live with all of these gray areas and we have to make decisions every day; "Do we walk down this street to our car at the end of a night?

Do we do this, do we do that?"

And I found myself asking over and over again, "Am I being brave or am I being stupid?"

(solemn melancholy music) (birds chirping) Nature was at the epicenter of healing from assault.

Some of the solo hikes that I did were both terrifying and empowering, oftentimes in the very same moment.

I was feeling pure joy for the first time since my assault in 2018, and I realized how healing all the solo travel and all the time alone was going to be for me.

(solemn serene orchestral music) Even though I didn't have that many financial resources, I had the ability to travel wherever I wanted to just like the birds.

(serene solemn orchestral music) (birds chirping) (wind whooshing) (intriguing orchestral music) - In October, Tiffany saw a blue-footed booby off the coast of California, which was her 700th bird of the year, which was also her original goal; that's kind of when she had a decision to make.

- I reached my goal right around the time I like basically completely ran out of money, and I was also absolutely exhausted.

I ended up getting my 706th bird, that was a rarity, and so that's the bird that made me decide that I was going to go and pursue the record, which was 724 species.

Near the end of the year, pretty much every single bird that you see is a rare bird, so you fly across the country, get one bird, fly across the country, get another bird.

I would often book flights to three different places for the same day, (zipper zipping) and I had a suitcase ready at all times.

- It really was a mad dash the next couple of months to try to get these last birds.

And at that point, it was just a blur of flights all over the country.

- I was so absolutely ridiculously tired, I wanted to quit, but I just decided that I was gonna do my best to find joy in the birds and find joy in every day.

- In December, she saw a Smith's Longspur in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and that was her 724th species of the year, which tied the record for the most birds ever seen in the lower 48.

There was still one more bird to go to break in.

(mellow orchestral music) She got a call that there was this extremely rare bird called a bat falcon that was actually of all places in South Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley, in the wildlife refuge that she'd worked when she first moved to Texas.

(mellow orchestral music continues) The bat falcon had never been seen in Texas ever, as far as we know.

It was almost unbelievable the concept that this could be her record-breaking species.

She looked through her scope, and that was it, 725, she was the champ.

- I was excited, but actually had to, after the excitement was over, excuse myself down a little trail and and cry a little bit because this is not about the number to me as much it was about this journey and how transformative and healing it was for me.

And it all culminated here, home, I'm less than 30 minutes away from my house at this refuge that I used to work at.

(wings flapping) (mellow orchestral music) That's just one of the absolute most special places on Earth to me.

(solemn mellow orchestral music) - [Will] She ultimately ended up with 726 birds, which made her the person who had seen the most birds in the lower 48 ever in a single year.

(solemn mellow orchestral music) (visitors chattering) - So in this tree here, the tallest dead big palm tree, there's a hole with an Eastern Screech Owl in there.

These owls will also use cavities like this for sleep.

Anyone wanna look?

- [Visitor] Well, it's still there, yeah.

- Tiffany is now leading her very successful bird watching company and leading tours in South Texas, and she's in a happier, more fulfilled spot in her life.

(visitors laughing) (solemn orchestral music) This is my first cover story on Texas Monthly.

Having people respond well to it and being able to share Tiffany's story like that was really fulfilling on a personal level.

You know, it is pretty cool in the end to see her triumphantly surrounded by all these birds on all the magazine racks; that was definitely very cool to see.

(solemn orchestral music) We've all had experiences or just known that there's moments when you have to change something to get into a better place.

(solemn orchestral music) - The best kind of story is overcoming hardship.

As a writer, for me, it was just a dream.

There's a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Starting from almost failure, through the high point, to ultimate success, he turned it into something that really worked.

- [Will] The fact that Tiffany was willing to put aside all of the good reasons not to go do this and do it anyway and then succeed makes for a really compelling journalism.

- [Patricia] It's just a great piece of Texas history.

(solemn orchestral music)