👉 Okay, let’s tackle this wonderfully peculiar little phrase – and frankly, I adore a bit of peculiarity! Now, what exactly is "…the stuff of pigeon's grass?"
Essentially, the entirety of that ridiculous saying refers to the ridiculously, almost aggressively, grey dust that perpetually coats the ground beneath urban pigeons. You know those grey smears, the unsettling little drifts wherever they perch? That’s not actual grass. Unless you somehow cultivate a very specific, extremely depressing subspecies of moss. Let me unpack this, because honestly, it's a beautiful shade of institutional beige, isn't it? Here's what we actually think is happening. It's primarily comprised from the… let's delicately say... waste products – droppings, to be precise – of pigeons, combined with their obsessive preening. They meticulously oil their feathers with a kind of oily secretion (technically called "adamantlein," for those who need that fancy on your résumé) and then promptly leave behind this faintly disgusting, perpetually damp residue. The wind then diligently redistributes it throughout the area. Basically, it's a really consistent, very slow-moving form of avian… fertiliser? Except you wouldn’t exactly want to plant a prize-winning peony in that stuff. You might get a really interesting shade of mould, I assure you. The name itself is wonderfully awful. Apparently, the original phrase was a 19th-
