At the Cape Town Mining Indaba in 2017, I interviewed former Gold Fields CEO Nick Holland, and he set me on a rodent trail high up in the Chilean Andes.
What a long, strange trip it’s been.
To wit, Holland told me that for the environmental permitting for Gold Fields’ Salares Norte gold mine project, the company needed to capture and relocate a colony of rabbit-sized chinchillas in the vicinity of the mine. I did a small story at the time for Reuters.
But the story piqued my curiosity. The critter in question, the short-tailed chinchilla, was almost hunted to extinction for its fur and had not been seen in the wild for almost five decades before it was rediscovered in 2001.
An intriguing saga – an $860m mine project that needed to accommodate two dozen rare rodents.
In 2020, I asked Gold Fields for an update and found out that “Operation Chinchilla” was a go. I did a story for the US science magazine Undark, detailing plans for the $400,000 operation to bait and live-trap the animals and move them to a suitable habitat.
The story got picked up by a number of other US publications and appeared on the radar screens of Chilean conservationists, bringing it under a new level of public scrutiny.
Gold Fields is good at mining, but rodent removal is not one of its core competencies.
Well, things went pear-shaped. Two of the first four chinchillas that were captured died. A survivor injured a leg and was flown to Santiago for treatment.
Chilean regulators halted “Operation Chinchilla”, but Gold Fields could continue building the mine, which poured its first gold in April 2024.
However it needed to come up with a new chinchilla plan, and even mulled going underground for one of the planned open pits to accommodate the animals.
Three years later, a new plan was approved and Gold Fields relaunched the chinchilla capture in February this year – at an inflated price tag running into undisclosed “millions” of dollars.
During an operational update in May, Gold Fields CEO Mike Fraser said in response to my questions that no chinchillas had been captured because it was “quite conceivable that the chinchillas moved on”.
I raised the possibility that this may well be the case because a mine had just been built in the chinchillas’ hood, prompting the fur balls to translocate themselves.
But it seemed curious that Gold Fields found this “conceivable” without knowing for sure. These are after all million-dollar rodents that are subjected to intense monitoring with cameras and have 16 vets at their disposal.
The upshot was that the story got picked up in Chile and the regulator again halted “Operation Chinchilla”, with the pointed demand that Gold Fields provide all of the evidence that the animals had indeed vacated “Rockery No. 3” – a piece of prime chinchilla habitat that was close to the mine waste site and which the company had initially been given permission to remove.
The moral of the story I guess is that small animals can be big headaches for mining companies. But it’s been one of the funnest and most fascinating tales I have ever covered and I look forward to the next act in this unfolding drama.