In a plastic dishpan on Judith Wakelam’s kitchen table, six huge, dark eyes gaze up at me from a huddle of pale-fringed faces and dusty black feathers, bladelike wings projecting outward at a variety of unlikely angles. These are baby common swifts, insectivorous birds so exquisitely aerial that they eat, sleep and mate on the wing and spend the first two or three years of their lives migrating between Europe and Africa in continuous flight.

Airborne swifts are renowned for their speed and grace, but the birds in front of me resemble a cross between subway mice and a pile of unexpectedly animate kindling. Their clawed feet are so tiny that they cannot walk, only shuffle, and their wings so long that they cannot take off from flat surfaces; should youngsters crash-land on the ground after leaving the nest, they’re as doomed as fish out of water.

Wakelam, a gentle and deliberate woman with silver hair cut in a practical bob, lifts one nestling up and sets it upon a tissue-covered towel. Plucking a defrosted black cricket out of a bowl, she touches it to the tip of a tiny beak, which opens into a pink maw that swallows the tip of her finger. The cricket disappears down the bird’s throat. Another follows. Wakelam frowns with concentration but feeds the bird with a calm assurance gained from long experience. Back in 2002, she spotted what she thought was a pile of feathers by the curbside while walking her dog. It was a swift chick. She brought it home. Numerous experts told her that as it would be too difficult to raise, it would die. ‘‘And of course it didn’t,’’ she said. ‘‘It survived. But it was a steep learning curve.’’

She’s now so well known for her skill with common swifts that they are brought to her from all over eastern England. Some come from vets, others from members of the public who have found birds that have fallen from nests and discovered her name on the Internet. This year, she has had nearly 30 in her care, raised on a diet of crickets and wax-moth caterpillars dusted with powdered vitamins. While some don’t make it — usually from being given unsuitable food by their initial rescuers — each one that she returns to the wild is a triumph over death. And the chance to observe that triumph is why I’m sitting in this small bungalow in a village near Royal Air Force Mildenhall, the military base in Suffolk where Wakelam used to work in communications and public affairs: If the wind drops later this morning, we’ll set some of her young birds free. ‘‘It can be very tiring,’’ she says. ‘‘The early mornings. But when you let one go, it’s just sheer magic. And sometimes I’m in the garden in the evening, and I might see 20, 30, 40 swifts in the air, and I think, I know they’re not, but they could be all mine.’’