Donna
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« on: 08-Mar-10, 07:57:51 AM » |
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FAIRHOPE, Ala. — “She’s been a big part of my life,” said James Blevins this week of his brown pelican buddy who goes by the name of Henry, but which he now thinks is a female bird. A girl pelican named Henry. If only Johnny Cash were still alive to write a song about it.
Here is the famous horn used by James Blevins, with its characteristic aoogha sound, he uses to call Henry from the sky for feeding. Staff photo by Mike Odom.
“You get attached to something like that,” Blevins said Thursday morning on the dock at the Pier Street boat launch park, looking frequently toward the heavens for the pelican he has come to know well since rescuing it on that very dock in the days following Hurricane Ivan in 2004.
“No, that’s not her,” he said, watching as a pelican approached several hundred yards away from the north. “She’s got a feather gone from just under the crook of her wing. I can spot her a mile away. She’s also got a knot on her shoulder I can see when she’s up close.”
The relationship between James and Henry has reached near mythic status, with many unbelievers, until they see man and bird together. Their story has even become memorialized in a children’s book published last year by a local author, who also had to shake her head in wonder when she saw Henry waddling along behind James on his motorized cart, right there along Mobile Bay on a sidewalk.
“She used to walk right behind or next to me,” Blevins said, of those early days when he was feeding Henry up near the Orange Street pier a few blocks to the south along the bay front park. “We had people stopping their cars right in the middle of traffic, and then getting out and taking pictures. I told Henry, ‘This is is not good idea.’”
So, these days, every morning in fact, Henry makes his daily trip to the Pier Street boat launch park in his motorized chair with a bagful of fish for Henry, or just to say hi. Henry’s almost always there. If not, it just takes a few aooghas on the classic horn just under his left armrest, to call Henry from the sky, circling down from amidst all the other pelicans, landing, and then miraculously, walking right up to Blevins, sometimes, it seems, almost getting right up in his lap.
But then, about several weeks ago, Henry disappeared. In the news, he said, was the story of how a more than 100 pelicans had died, all huddled together, probably starving to death because of the below-freezing temperatures at that time. That worried Blevins and his wife, Carmen.
“She was gone exactly 14 days,” Blevins said, still looking toward the sky for Henry, holding a bag of food at the ready, occasionally giving a honk on the horn with his left hand.
And then she showed back up on that 14th morning, he said.
“She was walking all around me,” he said. “I always used to pet her when she was younger, but lately she got to where she didn’t like it so much. But that day she was doing the same old thing. She kept going around and round, like she was trying to get close and show me something, or get me to pet her.”
What she was trying to show him, Blevins said, was a fish hook in her neck and fishing line that had bound her left wing to her side.
“She couldn’t fly, which meant she couldn’t fish,” he said. “I don’t know how she was staying alive, but she was hungry that day.”
Blevins got the hook out of her neck, and with the aid of another friend, while he held her beak, they got the fishing line off her wing. He said he was scared about how badly injured she might be.
“Then I saw her flying, and I knew then that she was going to be OK,” he said. “The next time I saw her up close, her left wing was hanging down. But some people say she’s just got me trained and does that on purpose.”
He smiles at that, thinking of Henry, with the wing hanging down, training him to bring her fish and to be there for her when she needs a fish hook taken out of her neck.
“She loves those big mullet heads,” he said of Henry, still looking in the sky for her. “She can eat like a horse.”
Though Henry didn’t appear in that brief 20 minutes Thursday morning, James said she’d probably show up later.
“She might be down at the big pier,” he said. “My wife saw her earlier right here this morning. And I saw her yesterday. She’s fine. She’s just fine.”
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