What does Mumbai feel like when you arrive in the city for the first time? Dr Samuel Wasser sums it up well. "If you ask me tomorrow, I'll have a better feel," he says. One day is never enough; after all, the conservation biologist isn't here on vacation.

After participating in a panel discussion at the US Consulate General, he also delivered a lecture at the Bombay Natural History Society yesterday on wildlife conservation. A recipient of the Albert Schweitzer Medal [whose past recipients include Jane Goodall and Rachel Carson], Wasser is also a professor at the University of Washington. And along the way of doing pioneering work of developing non-invasive tools to monitor wildlife over large landscape areas, he's earned a rather funny nickname — the Guru of Doo Doo [or excrement]. "My favourite term... I love it," he laughs, elaborating on how his laboratory was able to acquire DNA, toxins as well as stress, reproductive, and nutritional hormones from scat.