“I am stunned,” Chuck Bonham, director of the state Department of Fish and Wildlife, told a crowd of about 40 people at the Kendall-Jackson Wine Estate & Gardens in Santa Rosa, describing improved conditions for the thousands of juvenile salmon and steelhead trout trapped in four drought-diminished creeks until winter rain carries them to the river.

“I think we may actually make it,” he said. “Thank you from the big bad regulator at the Department of Fish and Wildlife.”

“What we have done here is the beginning,” said Karen Ross, secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture.

“Look at the future. It is going to build on what you’ve started here,” she said, referring to the challenge of coping with climate change. “This is what we’re going to have to do in this century,” Ross said.

The event came as a counterpoint to widespread resentment from the belief that vineyard expansion is largely to blame for creeks going nearly dry.

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