I was licking salt from the rim of my glass when Asli told me that elderly pelicans are often blind. She claimed that the force generated from smacking the water during a dive (and the fact that this act is repeated thousands of times in a pelican's lifetime) eventually destroys their vision. Asli did not come up with this little tidbit on her own. She is not that much into birds, or biology, or anything like that. She was enlightened by someone who knows.I was quiet for a while when I heard this. I always thought the natural world was more perfect than that. Pelicans are water birds. They swi