And now for something completely different

There's been so much noise in the last couple of weeks about NaMo versus RaGa, so much noise about MaBa (I guess), and her TMC goons, so much noise about JaTy (why not) and the dark cloud over his role in the 1984 Delhi riots … so much noise in so many different forms of professional and personal media, that there's not much left to say. Except, perhaps, that they probably all deserve what's coming to them.

You can't throw a pea without hitting a scam. You can expect that every two minutes some leader or the other will open his or her mouth only to say something crass that fully measures the increasing distance between power and its purpose. Politics is taking on that rather desperate edge it tends to when things are falling apart, the Opposition smells blood but is far from seductive itself, and the electorate is thoroughly disgusted.

That's why I've taken such pleasure in reading about other things these last few days - things related to nature and animals, both always vastly more interesting than politics. This week, if you're looking for opinion about elections, laws and suchlike, look elsewhere, because I'm up to the gills with all of it. We could all use a little more poetry in our lives.

So what's much more interesting to me right now is, for instance, the fact that dung beetles navigate straight lines by the Milky Way. How poetic is that? They climb on top of their dung balls and do what a scientific team described as "a little dance" to get their bearings, and then they're able to find their way straight to a safe place in the desert night - ie far away from other dung beetles who want to rob them of their dung - all by the compass of the Milky Way. Scientists discovered this by taping tiny hats to the heads of the beetles. With a hat on, the beetles ran around in confused circles. Without a hat, they travelled straight and true. Hat tip, so to speak, to the scientist who came up with the experiment.

Monarch butterflies, it turns out, have compasses that enable them to fly from their wintering sites in Mexico to Canada and back. Newborn butterflies that have never made the journey there before make it just fine. But it looks as if the insects don't have a map. If they're displaced, they still fly in the general direction they would ordinarily, without correcting their course. The yearly trajectory of a monarch butterfly is written into its body. That's poetry.

In China, a team of palaeontologists has been working on a site filled with dinosaur eggs that are over 190 million years old. They're theorising, based on what they've found, that dinosaur embryos contracted their muscles within the egg to spur growth and bone development, just as other animals (including, of course, humans) do. Just think of it: baby dinosaurs twitching away in their eggs, like little limericks, as the wild old earth develops around them.

I like that theory - there's something devastatingly cute about a baby dinosaur - but I like this even better: have you ever wondered how marine mammals that need to breathe air, sleep without drowning? Here it is: dolphins sleep by shutting down one half of their brain, and closing the opposite eye. That little trick allows the animal to maintain a low alertness, enough to navigate and watch for predators - and, crucially, to recognise when it needs to rise to the surface to take a breath. After two hours, the dolphin switches sides, resting the other side of the brain. There's evolutionary adaptation in sonnet form. Dolphin sleep is a great improvement over the human tendency to just be half-witted.

The total weight of all the insects that spiders eat every year, apparently, is greater than the total weight of the entire human population. And speaking of things that creep and buzz, here's a different kind of poetry, sparer and more brutal: dragonflies are perfect killing machines, with a 95 per cent kill rate, the ability to track a target, to fly backwards and in any direction, and to ambush their prey from below and behind. They're being compared to drones.

For a finale that vastly improves the quality of my day: if you close your eyes and let your mind drift into the further reaches of the galaxy, to where the beautiful planet Saturn rotates silently through space, you can add this extra bit of cosmic poetry - rain falls from the rings of Saturn onto the surface of the planet. It's enough to give you goosebumps.

And admiring the natural world beats the hell out of one more discussion about who should or shouldn't be prime minister in 2014.