Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/744/en

In the farm's surroundings — the barn swallow and the house martin, and the common swift, which no longer belongs to the swallows proper. One will form a picture of their manner of feeding — insects snatched in flight —, of their nesting sites: the barn swallows mostly indoors in the stalls, the house martins outdoors under the eaves of barns, the swifts in cavities of old masonry or the open roof-timbers of outbuildings. One will come to know their various calls and songs, follow their breeding, and much else besides. All of these are activities through which the body-bound soul-nature of these birds makes itself known to the senses. Their characteristic expression of being, however, is their tireless flight. As feathered head-sense beings they shoot through the air, trailing vortices behind them, modelling the airspace of the farm in wide sweeping arcs and lines throughout its far periphery — only to break away suddenly with powerful wingbeats, swift as lightning, upward, downward, or sideways, to seize their prey. Their activity is almost wholly exhausted in the most astonishing feats of flight, and this from morning to evening throughout the summer half-year. In winter they have gone southward and vanished.