The adults are unremarkable small, typical-looking shrews, but the juveniles possess one of the strangest devices found in the animal kingdom. At the end of their tails, they have a fantastic parachute structure formed of interwoven hair, which they normally use only once before discarding. When the time comes to leave the parental nest, they launch themselves into the air, relying on the thermal currents that rise from these bare rocky slopes in summer to carry them to a fresh habitat, in some cases several kilometres away. As a means of dispersal this is a bit hit-and-miss, but the inevitable high death rate that this behaviour produces among young parashrews is more than compensated for by the large numbers of offspring produced by each adult breeding pair.