It was 1970 and I was fresh out of high school when I got offered a temporary job with the NC Wildlife Commission. The Commission had just hired Wayne Bailey out of retirement to head up a project to trap wild turkeys in the Pisgah National Forest for relocation to different areas in NC that had few or no turkeys. Wayne had great success in West Virginia in expanding the turkeys there and now he would do the same for our state. I was hired as a driver and assistant to Wayne and for an 18 year old boy in love with Nature it was a dream job. We caught turkeys with a cannon net and those birds were released in lots of places across the state. At first it was various game lands (we called them "wildlife management areas" back then) but eventually they were released onto large private lands upon the promise that none would be hunted there for 5 years, to give the new birds some time to reproduce. Many places that have strong turkey populations now are the result of those early captures and releases that were done. My trail camera shot is from Chatham County and a place where turkeys are now expanding naturally. Every time I get photos of these amazing birds I think back to the days when they were absent from a huge part of their natural range. I'm glad that I had a very small part in returning turkeys to places where they were simply gone.