(gentle music) - I grew up playing in Turtle Creek.

You know, I would be out there catching crayfish, you know, take my fish and pole whenever I could.

- I was always an outdoorsy person and graduating from Susquehanna University, I did have a lot of experience with stream surveying.

- We've had lots of studies done on Turtle Creek, whether they be through Bucknell, Susquehanna, other organizations out there.

- And we got lucky enough to have EmmaLia this year as one of our interns who are gonna help with a lot of these streaming projects this year.

- The sound of the water here is just fantastic.

Back when I was a kid, I popped up a tent over there.

That was my bedroom for the summer.

As soon as I could reach the pedals on the tractor, I was driving tractor, raking hay, plowing ground, and disking and heavy tillage kind of stuff.

'Cause that's what was done.

- [Savannah] We started in the headwaters on Turtle Creek, where there's a lot of agricultural impacts.

- We're probably one of the first farms here in the valley to fence off the streams, put in managed cattle crossing.

Careful, that's electric there.

(laughs) When the cattle come down through their dedicated way, it's limiting their access to this.

Having livestock underneath the sun, enjoying themselves, kind of what everybody likes to see.

Those guys in particular.

It's healthier for them to stay outside of the watershed along the creek and they'll be happy as well.

- The bank originally was probably cut to about where you're standing, so a lot of this has been regraded, rather than that bank that was very eroded and causing some of the soil to just slough off into the stream.

There's some logs that actually go back into the bank.

Those are typically called a sill log.

So we'll have an excavator kind of pull the bank back in those spots and then we'll put a rebar piece through the actual log to make sure that it's stabilized and put in place into the bank and the stream bed.

And then this actually when the stream is flowing, will cause the stream flow to hit this and recentralize the flow, so that way these banks aren't getting eroded and this tow of the slope is stabilized.

I was very surprised by how construction oriented this was.

It's really important for us to have well-trained excavators.

You have to be in the stream trusting them with a giant log over your head.

It kind of looks a little scary at first.

You're in a hard hat, a safety vest, you're in work gloves, you're picking up a lot of powered equipment, sledge hammering, so it is a lot of physical work.

But also when we're doing the actual design, a lot of landowners when they come out to these sites, are surprised by how naturalized it looks.

- [Greg] It creates a beautiful habitat for fish to nest in under the bank.

- It's rewarding the second that we get done and see these fish moving into the habitat structures.

As something jumps in the stream.

(laughs) Maybe we can see if there's a macro invertebrate under here.

There's one thing.

One of those water (indistinct).

(Savannah laughing) - Crawfish.

- [Savannah] Nice.

- This here's part of a little mountain stream, and right down here is where the mountain stream comes into Turtle Creek.

You can tell it's a mountain stream.

It holds true to what it is.

The banks are not cut.

They vegetation is holding the back, not filled up with sediment, they're rolling clean.

- That's why a lot of these log structures catch some of that sediment that might be washed up in higher flows and then just fill in back of this log.

So it prevents it from getting further down into the channel, eventually reaching the Susquehanna River and the Chesapeake Bay.

- I've seen it, the Chesapeake, when, you know, all the major rivers up here in the northeast are flooding and then you just see that sediment pour out into the bay.

You know where it's coming from.

- A lot of the streams are listed by DEP as either impacted or some kind of level of impairment status for a certain thing.

So a lot of the ones in Union County, it's for siltation, which is excess sediments coming into the stream.

We have seen now that there are sections that can be delisted from the impairment status.

- It's not just one person making the difference.

It's a group of people that are working together and as long as everything's healthy, it takes care of itself.

Now you get to see where Turtle Creek leaves my custody and goes on to somebody else's.

- The neighbor next door might call us the next year for a stream stabilization project, because they talk to all the different farmers in the area, see the improvements that have happened and what benefits come from them.

So it really kind of sells itself.

(gentle music) - It's not so much work if it's what you love.

(gentle music)