FAIRHOPE, Ala. — The scene: Blue sky, white clouds, seagulls laughing, a great blue heron staring into the shallow waters of Mobile Bay and a slightly nervous writer sitting at a picnic table under a large Spanish moss-draped live oak.

“Do you think that’s Henry?” local author Theresa Lacey asked, nodding toward the brown pelican perched atop a tall metal pole in the water a few yards away.

“I’m not sure,” James Blevins said, looking up at the bird for the identifying black stripe on its beak. “Yes, I think it is.”

It was the week before Christmas, and Lacey was holding a package of colorful drawings of the story that first took hold of Lacey’s imagination after Hurricane Ivan hit the Alabama coast in September 2004.

A main character in the story was sitting in front of her at the Pier Street Boat Launch in Fairhope — and perhaps another character hovered above her, if that really was “Henry” up there on the pole.

“There was a bit of a risk that day, there sometimes is when you write about someone,” Lacey said this week, when she first showed the drawings of her upcoming picture book, Henry the Pelican, to Blevins on Dec. 20. “My illustrator took some artistic license. I’m so thrilled that James was happy with it.”

She needn’t have worried.

As Lacey flipped through the pages and told the unusual tale to Blevins and his wife, Carmen, her audience couldn’t stop smiling.

Here was the real-life story put into words and pictures that they had lived the past three years: finding the bird with the broken wing and feeding it until it grew stronger and could fly again.

“Somebody did some work there, didn’t they?” James said, grinning at the picture of the “James” in the book, many years younger than the real-life one.

Then he chuckled when Lacey told how he used a bike horn to call Henry, and how the pelican would almost always answer and come for a breakfast of fish James would bring most mornings to that same bay front area.

“I saw this guy honk a horn and then a pelican appeared,” Lacey said of the first time she saw James and Henry, shortly after Hurricane Ivan. “I’d never seen anyone feed a grown pelican by hand. I almost raced home for my camera.”

That story of a man who rescued a bird from the storm and their friendship planted the seed of the book in Lacey’s mind, a book she expects to have published early next year.

“I was totally entranced by the story,” she said. “They didn’t just leave Henry on the beach. There’s something about an injured animal that makes you want to care for it. It’s a universal feeling.”

Lacey, an English teacher at Roberstdale High School, has published more than half a dozen books, but this is her first picture book for young children. She is also publishing the book with an interlinear Spanish translation.

“I have a growing number of Hispanic students,” she said. “I spoke to parents who speak no English, which got me thinking of using the book as a teaching tool.”

The book is also a family affair. Her sister-in-law, Jan Jensen of Maryland, did the illustrations, and another in-law, Jose Estigarribia originally from Paraguay but who now lives in Florida, is doing the translation.

“I’m so glad that I had the opportunity to do this,” said Jensen, who has an art degree from the University of Alabama at Huntsville. “I learned a lot through the research and the story. I didn’t have pictures to work from about James. I just wanted to make sure he had a kind face.”

Lacey said she intends to donate a portion of the book proceeds to Weeks Bay Reserve.

She said that Henry the Pelican is a charming story, but it also has a moral.

“It has the enduring theme that life goes on even after tragedies like Ivan and Katrina.”