Starlings are songbirds, but in several videos and photos that have captured them during their migration, they appear to dance too.

The birds, called a murmuration when in a flock, were spotted above the skies in southern Israel, near the town of Rahat on this month, and before that, in Norwich, Britain last month, according to reports by British newspaper The Telegraph.

There is science behind the way the birds move. It enables them to be "always ready to optimally respond to an external perturbation, such as predator attack", wrote researchers led by University of Rome theoretical physicist Giorgio Parisi in a 2010 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper in the United States.

Some formations can be made up of tens of thousands of birds.