FAIRHOPE, Ala. — “Come on Henry, where are you?”

Last Thursday, James Blevins was calling out for his unlikely companion of the past three years at the Pier Street Boat Launch on Mobile Bay in Fairhope.

Then he looked to the sky.

“I bet they already came down here and fed him,” he said. “I told them not to do that.”

It was 9:30 a.m., Dec. 20, a little later in the day than Blevins usually makes his mile-long trip to the bay in his electric scooter to feed the brown pelican that he calls “Henry.”

“If he’s already full, he might not come,” he said.

He looked to the sky again where two pelicans were flying, and then down on the water near the dock where a couple were floating on the waves. None of those pelicans answered his call, so Blevins reached back and laid his left hand on a bicycle horn attached to his scooter.

“It’s amazing to me,” said a man who asked to be identified as just one of the “regulars” who visited that pier. “James has been taking care of it since Ivan. Henry’ll leave during the warm months, but at the first cold snap, he’s back here. He can honk that horn, and he’ll come. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

It was a few days after Hurricane Ivan tore through the Alabama-Florida Gulf Coast in September 2004, when Blevins first saw a small pelican at the end of the Pier Street dock.

He walked out to it, and the bird looked up at him, but couldn’t seem to move.

“She was about dead with a broke wing and almost starved,” he said. “When I saw her in that bad of shape, I told her, even though I knew she couldn’t understand me: ‘If you’ll stay here, I’ll keep you fed until you get better.’”

Blevins calls Henry a “he” sometimes and a “she” others, because after he had named it, someone told him that “Henry” was actually a female.

A wildlife biologist with the state conservation office in Daphne is not so sure about that, saying it’s hard to tell the difference.

But male or female, it’s very possible that Henry or “Henrietta” as the pelican is also known, could be spending the breeding months of April to October on a spoil island in the middle of Mobile Bay, said Roger Clay, with the Wildlife and Freshwater Fisheries Division of the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.

“Alabama’s claim to fame for the brown pelican is Galliard Island and the 4,000 to 5,000 pairs of birds that nest out there each year,” Clay said. “The first pelicans nested there in 1983, when there were four nests.”

He said a female pelican usually lays three eggs, each about twice the size of an extra large chicken egg. They take 30 days to hatch, then about eight to 10 weeks before their first flight. He said they can live for 15 to 20 years.

“They’re the only pelican of about eight species that dive from a height to feed,” he said. “It’s funny about them. Each one’s different. For whatever reason, that one’s learned to answer to that horn.”

He said that his office does an annual survey of the numbers on Galliard Island, and this year there were approximately 4,500 pairs.

Pesticides threatened the future of the brown pelican in the Southeast in the early 1970s, according to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia.

A research group from the University of Tampa “found that DDT caused the pelican eggshells to be overly thin and incapable of supporting the embryo to maturity,” the Web site states. “As a result of this research, DDT usage was eliminated in Florida and the rest of the country.”

Clay said that brown pelican numbers began increasing in Alabama since that time and peaked at Galliard Island in 1999 with 5,200 pairs.

On Thursday, Carmen Blevins was also at the pier with her husband, James, to see if Henry would show up so late in the morning.

“I think it took James as its mother,” she said about the early relationship between the injured pelican and her husband. “I called everybody I could find to care for it, but they said, ‘We don’t do that.’ So, we just started doing it ourselves and hoping for the best.”

Several other people lingered about Thursday morning wondering if Henry was going to make an appearance.

One of them has written an illustrated children’s book about him and the man who kept him alive after the storm.

“We were visiting here, and I was walking my dog down to the bay,” said local author Theresa Lacey. “I saw this guy come up and honk a horn, and this big old pelican swooped down, then walked up to him. He started hand feeding it. it was like a story had fallen right into my lap.”

She expects to have Henry the Pelican published early next year.

Blevins said that during the first few weeks of his feeding the pelican, Henry stayed on the dock or close by, but over time grew stronger.

“You could tell she was practicing and wanted to fly,” he said. “She’d also try to dive. You can still feel the broken spot on her wing.”

He said that it was about six months later that he first saw her fly.

“It was something,” he said. “She was with me for about a year that first time before she left, and then she was gone about 30 days. She’s been gone more than six months this time. We were starting to wonder.”

Blevins said that first year he did something with Henry that he doesn’t do anymore.

“She’d be walking right next to me on the sidewalk from Orange Street pier to here,” he said, referring to another pier several hundred yards down the beach. “But I was concerned about dogs, so I had to stop that.”

It was also during that time that Blevins started thinking of how best to let Henry know he was there with his breakfast.

“I got to thinking if I could train her to that horn, she’d come,” he said.

It must have been fate.

James hurt his back in an accident in the mid-1990s that eventually made it hard for him to walk.

Henry broke her wing and almost starved to death after Hurricane Ivan.

They were both in the right place at the right time in late September 2004.

“It’s inspirational to everybody,” Carmen said, looking at her husband as he kept calling for Henry to no avail.

It was time for the horn.

James squeezed the horn several times, honking loudly.

“Come on now, Henry!” he yelled.

Suddenly, out of the sky it seemed like a dozen brown pelicans, all of them swirling and banking in the air, started landing on the boat launch or dock all at once.

But one pushed his way to the front, and waddled straight up the concrete launch toward James.

Then Henry, with an identifying black stripe on his beak, cocked his head.

Blevins smiled and dug deep into the plastic bag he carried and pulled out a white trout.

Henry tipped his giant beak straight back, opened and swallowed

“He ate that one right up, didn’t he,” Blevins said.

Carmen watched as if she had never seen it before.

“At the start of the season, she’s a little shy,” she said. “She’s only been back about three weeks this time. By the end of the season, she’ll hop right up in his lap.”