Intrepid postdoc and all-around good guy, Andrea Contina, is now an Assistant Professor at UT Rio Grande Valley.  Read more about Postdoc Andrea Contina Starts TT at UTRGV

We heard reports of an odd jay at a feeder in San Antonio. Postings looked good for a Green X Blue Jay hybrid. We have been tracking the expansion of the Green Jay range in Texas and had also noticed that Blue Jays are also expanding South and West. The ranges have only recently come into contact, so this was an unexpected and truely remarkable discovery. Intrepid graduate student Brian Stokes managed to capture the bird. I will be excited to Read more about Possible Blue X Green Jay hybrid!

Thanks to our generous funders, we purchased a 1-U rackmount server. It is a supermicro server with a 64-core AMD chip and 45TB zfs raid array. The primary use is hosting our PostGIS-enabled database. We wanted to train some neural networks and so purchased an NVIDIA 4090 GPU. The question is how to connect it to a 1-U server chasis. The solution I came up with is to run a PCIe cable out the back and attach the GPU externally with its own power supply. The blocker was that I did not know that the PSU will not power up without being plugged into a motherboard. In the end, I figured out that I Read more about Fitting an NVIDIA 4090 in a 1-U server

I recently pulled the eBird dataset into postgresql and decided to look at which day of the year has the most recorded species in Parulidae. Its April 17th. This is for Chambers and Galveston counties that include Anahuac, the Bolivar, and Galveston Island. It turns out calculating warblers-per-minute effort is useless without doing rarefaction. The vast number of lists in April along the coast wash out any signal as you run out of warblers to see pretty quickly.