Dredging while preserving wildlife

Hi all. I’m working on a property with an old pond midway down a slope. They brought in some fill to recontour an area above the pond but didn’t get their cover crop planted in time, so there has been significant sedimentation due to erosion in the pond.

It is primarily used as a wildlife pond, but there is an eye to using it to irrigate an orchard down the line. There’s a lot of conversation about the need to dredge, but it has a healthy population of frogs, turtles, crawfish…. We want to minimize impact in the wildlife, but probably around 24 inches of muck needs to be pulled out. My first thought is a drag line and pull out a couple buckets a far while picking through for critters…but that’s a lot of time and effort. It isn’t a huge pond, maybe 35 x 18 feet.

Any thoughts in the hive mind?

Thanks,
Daniel

From what I've seen, leaving a shallow sloping shelf around the edge and digging a deep centre will provide habitat to a wide range of creatures. I'm not sure how deep it is now or how easy access is, but sometimes in the slow season you can get a local guy with a trackhoe who will make short work of that job. My 2c.

Thanks, Douglass. I suppose digging it out gradually over time from the middle might give the critters a good chance of survival.