When it comes to women's rights, New Zealand's native birds are really leading the charge.
Everywhere in the country's unique wildlife are examples of women's lib to the extreme, with male kiwi birds relegated to egg-sitting duties and male quails tasked with running the chick creche. Even male frogs are required to lug their youngsters around.
All the while the females - generally bigger and more gloriously adorned - are free to do as they please.
"The ladies are wearing the pants around here," says Allison, my guide through a special slice of New Zealand bush in the capital of Wellington.
"There's a whole lot of equality.
"Maybe that's why the women in New Zealand got the vote first," she says, laughing.
I've gone bush to have my first close encounter with NZ wildlife - just three hours away on a plane but so unlike our own.
These animals don't have the flamboyant colouring of Australia's rainbow lorikeet and crimson rosella, the cuteness of the koala or the exuberance of the kangaroo, but, as I discovered, they don't need to.
They're endlessly fascinating in their own right.
And I get to do this exploring in a rural oasis just five minutes drive from the latte-sipping cultural hub that is downtown Wellington.
A couple of twists through the steep hills surrounding the capital and I turn from a busy suburban street into a meandering lane overlooking 225 hectares of native bush.
This isn't just any tree-clad reserve. Karori Sanctuary is home to hundreds of native critters not found in the wild anywhere else on New Zealand's mainland.
Among them is New Zealand's iconic kiwi, the ancient dinosaur cousin, the tuatara, the grotesque cockroach-like giant weta and the world's oldest species of frogs.
It's not home to much else either, thanks to a 8.6 kilometre fence that stops much-maligned mice and Australia's own possum - a New Zealand pest - from having a native feast for dinner.
"We're recreating New Zealand the way it used to be, before predators, before humans even arrived here. It's a real living ark," says Allison as we trudge out into the bush.
The radical concept has a 500-year vision and, just 14 years in, it's still in its infancy, but already it's brimming with birdlife.
"Listen!" she says, cupping her ear upwards to pick up the penetrating alarm call 'yeng, yeng, yeng' of a stitchbird, a sparrow-sized native not seen on the mainland since the 1950s.
One of their quirks is their face-to-face mating ritual.
"They're just like humans in that sense, unlike any other bird," my guide says.
Further along the track we meet one of the sanctuary's star residents, a female tuatara who sits motionless and eyes us less than a metre away.
Ignoring her spiny back, she could resemble an Australian lizard but she's actually an ancient relative of T-rex.
"The first tuataras lived side by side with dinosaurs and witnessed the great geological upheavals of the world," the sanctuary's resident conservation manager Raewyn Empson tells me later.
"It's so ancient, it's almost mystical."
Primitive qualities, like their stone cold body temperature and their partially-formed `third eye', add to their mystery.
But there's fewer than 100,000 left because their ancient ways are working against them.
Breeding is rare - females opt to mate every two to five years, and even then, she is lucky to conceive.
"The male doesn't have a penis so they have to entangle them in just the right way to have any luck," Allison says.
Things have been looking up lately with the discovery of a tiny one-month old baby at Karori, the first to be spotted on the mainland in two centuries.
Breeding is also troublesome for the sanctuary's other big draw card, the nation's nocturnal iconic little spotted kiwi.
Only 1,400 of these birds remain and 10% of them are found right here. I won't spot one now; I need a night tour for that. But I'm told the female grows and lays just one egg a season, and what an egg it is.
"It's huge, equivalent to a woman giving birth to a six year old," my guide says. "She invests everything for a single, well-formed chick and if it dies, she's got nothing."
After laying it though, she gets her own back, ordering her long-term mate to incubate the egg for up to three months while she roams free.
"She'll hang out with the other females, recovering I suppose."
This a theme in New Zealand wildlife, Allison tells me, with the male Maud Island Frogs, the world's most primitive frog, expected to carry hatched tadpoles around on their backs.
"And if you look at the quails, it's the boys that have to do all the childcare dirty work."
We soon pass a female paradise duck with a brighter, prettier plumage than her mate and a cave weta twice as big and creepy in the female variety, and I get the picture.
The sanctuary houses its weta in five star accommodation, little "apartments" carved into the split trunks of trees. A plastic cover allows visitors to flick the latch and peer into each creepy-crawly's abode.
On the home stretch now, but there's one last wonder to discover.
The antithesis of the kiwi, the kaka, is one of the country's most rambunctious birds, I discover when they swoop down low over us.
"They know we're talking about them. Anything to get in on the action," Allison says.
The green bush parrot has a reputation as a destroyer, and last winter the teenaged kaka proved that point by learning to unscrew the fronts of nest boxes.
"What could be worse when you've got adult kaka inside trying to get romantic," she says as we emerge from the lush bush and into sight of suburbia.
"Talk about ruining the moment."
After all I've heard, I'll just assume they're teenage girls. After all it's the women who rule the roost here.
Karori Sanctuary is 225 hectares of wilderness just five minutes from downtown Wellington. Admission is $14 for an adult, while guided day and night tours range from $28 to $60.
For more information, visit www.sanctuary.org.nz.
The writer, Tamara McLean, was a guest of Positively Wellington Tourism.
