Spillover: the powerful, prescient book that predicted the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic.

by David Quammen

At the Chatou market in Guangzhou, for instance, he had seen storks, seagulls, herons, cranes, deer, alligators, crocodiles, wild pigs, raccoon dogs, flying squirrels, many snakes and turtles, many frogs, as well as domestic dogs and cats, all on sale as food. There were no civets, not when he saw the place; they had already been demonized and purged. The list he recited was just a selection, from memory and from his own discreet inspections, of what food markets were offering then. You could also buy leopard cat, Chinese muntjac, Siberian weasel, Eurasian badger, Chinese bamboo rat, butterfly lizard, and Chinese toad, plus a long list of other reptiles, amphibians, and mammals, including two kinds of fruit bat. Quite an epicure’s menu. And of course birds: cattle egrets, spoonbills, cormorants, magpies, a vast selection of ducks and geese and pheasants and doves, plovers, crakes, rails, moorhens, coots, sandpipers, jays, several flavors of crow. One fellow, a Chinese colleague of Aleksei’s, told me that the bird-and-bat trade was covered by an adage: “People in south China will eat everything that flies in the sky, except an airplane.” He was a northerner himself.

I don't even know most of these animals!