West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice said he fondly remembers hearing the distinctive call of the northern bobwhite quail when he was a boy. Like many others, he hunted the birds well into the 1970s before they largely disappeared from the state.

Now, the governor is trying to bring back the northern bobwhite, also known simply as quail, to the Mountain State by reintroducing 21,000 of them this year in the state’s biggest repopulation campaign to date.