(crickets chirping) 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?

It was almost unbelievable.

If you don't try, no glory.

(dramatic music) ANNOUNCER: Major funding for this program was provided by.

NARRATOR: At H-E-B, we're proud to offer over 6,000 products grown, harvested, or made by our fellow Texans.

♪ I saw miles and miles ♪ NARRATOR: It's all part of our commitment to preserving the future of Texas and supporting our Texas neighbors.

(gentle music) NARRATOR: Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation is dedicated to conserving the wild things and wild places in Texas.

Learn more at tpwf.org.

(dramatic music) (upbeat music) This is more than just the story of a restaurant.

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 during this story.

I'm retiring and I've been at 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.

(customers chattering) 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.

I'm Tom, but I've got a drink in my hand, so.

As a young man, I was living in Dallas, and my father passed away.

(gentle 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 blowing) (Tom yelling) Ranching is a very difficult task.

(dramatic music) (cow 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 just, I enjoyed cooking.

PATRICIA: So he started catering parties that ranches would have.

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.

I went to my mentor, Wat Matthews, and I said, "Wat, I cannot make this work."

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

(gentle music) And I said, "Yes sir," and I opened the steakhouse.

(upbeat 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.

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 now we are 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.

PATRICIA: 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 a Perini Martini garnished with a blue cheese stuffed olive.

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 bitter.

But I will also tell you, Pat was the type 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.

(gentle music) Restaurant business is tough, and you know, if you go to the 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.

1995 was the year everything changed.

(upbeat 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 than 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 steaks, 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."

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 in '95, 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.

(diners chattering) (light fizzles) If there's something that you really want to 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 out to dinner.

Hi, I'm Lisa.

I'm Abigail.

Abigail, it's 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.

(hopeful music) TOM: My mother said to keep this ranch together, and so we did.

(dramatic music) I think this story is about a lot of things, but in large part about healing.

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

My name's Will McCarthy, and I wrote "The Really, Really Big Year" for "Texas Monthly."

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

(gentle 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."

Tiffany Kersten is a bird watching guide.

She's also a very driven person.

She described her personality as addictive.

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.

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, 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.

(gentle 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, me and my dog at the time, and almost instant regret.

And then I lost my job, 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.

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, 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?"

(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.

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 the store for me, but effectively immediately, and until life demands otherwise, I am doing a big year."

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

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

Doing a big year is different than your standard affair 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.

TIFFANY: So efficiency is important.

I did a lower 48 states big year, 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 travel.

Estimated I drove 49,000 miles.

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.

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.

She was just sort of grappling with feeling afraid.

Beyond my own interviews with Tiffany, there was also a journal, like an online blog chronicling the birds 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 the 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?

(soft music) 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.

Even though I didn't have that many financial resources, I had the ability to travel wherever I wanted to, just like the birds.

(birds chirping) (bright 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, and I had a suitcase ready at all times.

WILL: It really was a mad dash the next couple 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 it.

(gentle 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 had worked when she first moved to Texas.

The bat falcon had never been seen in Texas ever, as far as we know.

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

She looked through the 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 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.

That's just one of the absolute most special places on earth to me.

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.

(people chattering) So in this tree here, the tallest dead big palm tree, there's a hole with a eastern screech owl in there.

These owls will also use cavities like this for sleep.

Anyone wanna look?

WILL: Tiffany's now leading her very successful birdwatching company and leading tours in South Texas, and she's in a happier, more fulfilled spot in her life.

(gentle 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.

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

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 the good reasons not to go do this and do it anyway and then succeed makes for really compelling journalism.

PATRICIA: It's just a great piece of Texas history.

NARRATOR: I don't think there's other magazines out there that really go to the links to come up with a list like this.

Two, three.

GROUP: Brisket!

COOK: It is like the bible of barbecue Texas.

COOK: Everyone that cooks Texas barbecue, this is what you strive for.

COOK: This is the end all be all of barbecue.

The state of the union.

COOK: There's a lot of buzz with the new list coming out.

♪ I love it ♪ We're on the precipice of a great discovery.

(upbeat music) ♪ I love it ♪ Fasten your seatbelt.

(gentle music) SPEAKER: As long as we're together, it's perfect.

SPEAKER: Love is not as simple as you seem to think.

SPEAKER: We're so close to cracking the case.

Dreams do come through, eh, lad?

ANNOUNCER: Major funding for this program was provided by.

NARRATOR: At H-E-B, we're proud to offer over 6,000 products grown, harvested, or made by our fellow Texans.

♪ I saw miles and miles ♪ NARRATOR: It's all part of our commitment to preserving the future of Texas and supporting our Texas neighbors.

(gentle music) NARRATOR: Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation is dedicated to conserving the wild things and wild places in Texas.

Learn more at tpwf.org.