Photos by Eric Brady | The Roanoke Times

Megan Bradley (left) and Brian Watson, biologists with the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, spread plants and snails to a new section of the North Fork of the Roanoke River, which the department is diverting to ease erosion and reduce sediment .

Biologists studied the stream’s life before the diversion and will come back to study the health of the stream in a year

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• River restoration

CATAWBA VALLEY -- A little yellow dozer tracked around the field, scooping buckets of dirt into a dump truck. An excavator scooped out a ditch, dropped giant gravels into it and pounded them into place. Tiny orange flags marked a trail the excavator and dozer would soon follow.

A stream -- actually the headwaters of the North Fork of the Roanoke River a short distance from the Montgomery-Roanoke county line -- burbled nearby, indifferent to the construction project that would soon move it a few feet.

This is a stream restoration project.

Bill Bennett is a restoration biologist with Virginia's Department of Game and Inland Fisheries. He's been watching this little stream cut through this particular field for more than a year now. About a foot of stream bank has washed out in that time. That's added sediment to the water, and sediment is a bad thing -- especially for the Roanoke logperch, a federally-declared endangered fish that lives downstream from this project.

Sediment makes it harder for the logperch to find food. Sediment clogs the logperch's gills. Sediment is the biggest threat to the species' survival, Bennett said.

So Bennett and a crew composed mostly of volunteers are working with the owners of Headwaters Farm and an excavation contractor to undo the damage enterprising agriculturalists wrought over more than 200 years.

"This wasn't natural," Bennett said, waving toward the nearly straight course and steep bank the stream is cutting now.

Farmers moved the stream to give them more uninterrupted farmland. That may have been good for short-term production, but it was bad for the long-term health of the waterway.

"You could see where the channel used to come through here," Bennett said, pointing to the field's swells and dips. "Basically, you're trying to mirror what nature would have done."

Bennett knows he was on the mark because as they excavated the new streambed, workers turned up old streambed material.

"We could just leave this and nature would fix itself, too," Bennett said.

But the stream's recutting of its path would create a lot of sediment and carry off a lot of land. Nature would also stretch the work over a long time.

"It's kind of hard to say," Bennett said, "but I would guess over 100, 200 years."

Bennett and his crew will do the job in about a week.

They'll cut a new channel, mirroring as much as possible the route the stream followed 300 years ago. They'll plant rye and native grasses along the bank. The rye is to hold the bank this winter, so the native grasses can take over come spring. Then they'll plant trees -- sycamores, walnuts, oaks, hickories -- to help protect the bank from erosion and to shield the stream from the sun.

Stream restoration projects are funded by the game department and the landowner -- with the landowner responsible for a quarter of the cost. But a landowner's contribution doesn't have to be hard cash. It can be paid in material or sweat as well.

Restoring this 800-foot section of stream will cost about $40,000.

"Because we have a limited amount of money, we try to concentrate on areas with threatened species," Bennett said.

So the Roanoke logperch, 10 miles downstream from Bennett's project, is awaiting the North Fork's restoration.

But the logperch isn't all that lives downstream. Game fish and the critters they live on will benefit from the cleaner, cooler water and the deeper pools.

Water quality in general will improve, and that will trickle down through the North Fork to the spots along the Roanoke River where Roanoke County, Roanoke and Salem draw drinking water.