A lot of what you need will depend on what your site looks like to begin with, there is no essential list of equipment as things are different with each project. My grand father built ponds for years, over 400 of them in fact, without ever having an excavator or a backhoe. A man who is good with a dozer and a towed scraper can do a great deal in a days time. If you have a wet area you will likely need a newer style low ground pressure dozer or a good dragline operator to shift the muck, wheeled eauipment is useless in mud and mud requires an entirely different approach than dry spoil does. I know this because I have been fighting with a wet area for a couple years now, with my own dragline, and I have just gotten most of this figured out the hard way, heh heh. Not two situations are the same, if you are in dry soil, lucky you, if you are digging mud, you have my sympathies as I know what you are going thru. If you are building a pond in a gulley where a waterway exists, my best advice is to hire the dam work done at least, the contractor who builds that dam is responsible for it for the rest of his life, so he will build it right, and he has probably built a dam or two in his day as well.
