With this issue California Birds becomes Western Birds, and the journal’s geographic coverage expands to encompass states and provinces from the Rocky Mountains westward, including Alaska and Hawaii, western Texas, and adjacent portions of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean. This expansion is designed to increase the flow of manuscripts, the shortage of which has made it impossible to publish California Birds on a regular schedule, and to provide a medium for publication of field studies from those areas of the West where no state or other local publication of a similar nature exists.