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Question: How many people does it take to capture alive and relocate a colony of around two dozen rabbit-sized chinchillas high up in the Chilean Andes?
Answer: Apparently, quite a few.
In its latest update on Operation Chinchilla, which Gold Fields launched in 2020 to translocate the highly endangered critters to make way for its Salares Norte gold mine, the JSE-listed miner revealed to Daily Maverick that it now has around 78 full-time staff working on the issue.
As my colleague Tim Cohen would say, I am not making this up.
In response to my queries last week when Gold Fields provided a brief update on the project in a quarterly operational report, the company said it now had 58 environment specialists – consultants and Gold Fields staff – dedicated to the chinchillas, plus around 20 working on data systems to support the environmental work.
After the project began in 2020, the Chilean regulator halted it when two of the first four captured chinchillas died. Two were successfully moved to their new home only a few kilometres away. One suffered an injured leg and was flown to Santiago for treatment, underscoring the depth of Gold Fields' concerns.
The rodent round-up has since been given the green light to proceed again, and to date – over the course of four years – only those two animals have been relocated. With staffing for the operation at almost 80, that equates to about 40 for every chinchilla relocated so far.
Rhino relocation
By way of jarring juxtaposition, the NGO African Parks in September 2023 bought game tycoon John Hume's 2,000 white rhinos and associated breeding project in North West with the aim of translocating and rewilding the herd over the next decade.
So far this year, African Parks has moved 40 of the pachyderms to the Munywana Conservancy in KwaZulu-Natal, 120 to member reserves of the Greater Kruger Environmental Protection Foundation (GKEPF) in Mpumalanga and Limpopo, and an undisclosed number to the Dinokeng Game Reserve in Gauteng.
That is more than 160 white rhinos, and while a lot of staff and resources would be required for such an operation – darting, loading, transport, vet care – a similar human-to-animal ratio as the the chinchilla operation would entail more than 6,400 staff, and that seems unlikely.
White rhinos are the world's largest land mammal after elephants, with bulls tipping the scale at over three tonnes. Chinchillas typically weigh in at around 1.2kg – this correspondent has caught trout that weighed more.
The rodent vs the rhino riddle
So, how does one explain this rodent and rhino riddle? Why are the chinchillas proving to be so problematic compared to dangerous mammals 1,500 times their size, and why has Gold Fields poured such a mammoth effort into the project?
For starters, South African conservationists and the game industry have decades of experience capturing and moving megafauna, with techniques and technology honed to perfection.
In 1960, 60 years before Gold Fields initiated Operation Chinchilla, Ian Player – the late older brother of golfing legend Gary – launched Operation Rhino to translocate white rhino to the Kruger National Park and other reserves and zoos from the species' last outpost in KwaZulu-Natal.
"How does one capture and transport the second-largest animal in the world, so placid when at large, and so demonic when in captivity?" asked Alan Paton in a preface to Player's book The White Rhino Saga.
There was a lot of trial and error involved, but the basics of darting the animals with tranquillisers, moving the creatures to a boma to allow them to get accustomed to their new home and other measures were worked out by Player and his team, setting the stage for such operations today. This includes those that involve elephants and other big animals.
"Mini-fauna" by contrast can present unexpected challenges, and Gold Fields was working off a tabula rasa – there was simply no precedent for the undertaking.
Chinchillas are highly endangered because they had almost been hunted to extinction for their highly coveted fur. They are easy enough to catch and not known for their ornery disposition.
But how does one do it if the intention is not to kill and skin the animal?
Well, it all seemed straightforward: lure the animals into live traps with bait, move them to an enclosure and then release them into their new home.
The two animals that died in the initial effort suggest that perhaps it was not so simple. Unlike rhinos, chinchillas would appear to be fragile.
Among other things, Gold Fields has increased monitoring and finetuned its plans with different enclosure designs and that kind of thing.
But it doesn't have the luxury of trial and error any longer – it needs to get this right, and to its credit, it is not taking any chances. So astonishingly, it has almost 80 employees working on the project.
This would have been unthinkable a few decades ago, but ESGs – environmental, social and governance concerns – are now the flavour of the month.
Public outcries over the fate of the chinchillas have dramatically raised the stakes in the game – cute creatures are fine fodder for animal welfare campaigns – and Operation Chinchilla is now considered "material" in Gold Fields' C-suite.
Gold Fields' current focus in the rebooted operation has been Rockery Area No 3, a stony piece of prime habitat that is close to the mine waste dump.
During an operational update in May, Gold Fields CEO Mike Fraser said that none of the animals had been detected in the rockery – and that the chinchillas had conceivably relocated themselves – and so the company now had permission to remove the rockery.
It seemed inconceivable that the most-scrutinised rodent population on Earth could vanish like that, and the Chilean regulator halted the dismantling of the rockery – news that knocked 6% off Gold Fields' share price.
The green light has once again been given; and capture-and-relocation activities are scheduled to recommence at Rockery Area No 3 this month. Gold Fields told me that chinchillas have been identified in other rockeries.
But getting a precise number is hard as one chinchilla may trigger a camera sensor several times. The initial estimates were that there were around two-dozen of the fur balls in the mine's vicinity.
Construction of the mine, which poured its first gold in March this year, has never been halted because of the chinchillas – at least not yet.
In response to an analyst's query last week on a call regarding the quarterly update, Fraser did say they wanted any chinchillas that might be in Rockery No. 3 translocated by the end of next year or early 2026 "… because that is where we do require placement of some waste material".
"We think we've got plenty of time now to complete the capture of the chinchillas and relocation to gain access to Rockery Area No 3 … We feel quite confident now, we have enough float in our plan without it risking the mining activities," he said.
Gold Fields certainly would seem to have enough staff to carry out Operation Chinchilla and the plan needs to float because the company cannot let it sink. DM
