This is a native Costa Rican, well, bug.

COSTA RICA IS KNOWN FOR ITS BIODIVERSITY, but this never really sunk in for me until a little piece of it flew into my ear.

Being midnight, I was sleeping more or less peacefully at the time. I woke to hear the buzzing of some anonymous tiny insect in my ear, but to my horror I could also feel this buzzing.

This sort of thing never happened in Washington, where I grew up, nor in New Mexico, which I now call home. Those places feature millions of bugs, but Costa Rica is home to - and this statement has been scientifically vetted - a million billion jillion gazillion.

It’s not just bugs. It’s life of all kinds. Trees, bushes, grasses, fungi, mice, geckos, monkeys, and hummingbirds. They show up all over the

Life - pure life - is really the modus operandi here, the sort of place that Calvin and Hobbes would love.

“It’s an endless source of wonder and amazement,” my friend Eric told me the other day. “You could spend the rest of your life studying the moths in this country and not get 5 percent.”

Some fly like jets, some like drunks. He even saw one that rolls its wings up like an old piece of parchment.

We’re not just talking about starry-eyed tourists either. Once, when Eric was cleaning out an old building in another part of the country, some of his fellow volunteers, 13-year-old girls as it happens, displayed their own unique appreciation for biodiversity.

“These girls were gently reaching down and picking up these scorpions and carrying them out and letting them go. I thought, ‘whoa, this is truly something new under the sun.’”

He told me this as we killed time in the front yard of Enrique and Anna, who have been living in Providencia for ages now. Having a surplus of bananas, which grow like weeds around here, they wondered what to do with them, but eventually settled on putting them out for the birds.

Quickly, it became about the most interesting activity available on a lazy Saturday afternoon. All sorts of birds, in all sorts of shapes and sizes, now drop by for a snack. To the uninitiated, it’s a wonderful display of unique color not unlike a tropical fish tank. To those who know a few things about birds, the dramas that lie just beneath the surface are laid bare.

The result is something that Enrique insists is much better than television. To this day, he still often runs into species, be they bird or bug, that he has never seen before.

On the other hand, mused Kim, a fellow volunteer from Massachusetts, the birds are awfully like television. The hot topics for the birds include food, sex, and enemies, which is basically what every Bond flick has been about.

And as if frequently running into all manner of tarantula, gecko, and moth were not enough to remind you, Costa Ricans tend to greet each other with the maxim “Pura Vida” (Pure Life). They use it where English speakers would blandly use an uncaring “How Are You?”

So it was with a surprising serenity, and probably the effects of being caught in the wrong place on the REM cycle, that I tolerated the buzzing bug in my ear. This, after all, was a pretty unique Costa Rican experience (or at least a tropics experience). It buzzed around every 30 seconds or so, and kept it up for several minutes. Then it was quiet for a few minutes more.

At last, I thought. It’s gone. I started drifting back to sleep, but then it started buzzing again. This was getting out of hand, I thought.

But as I was about to fetch some water to throw in my ear, I heard/felt the buzzing move to my outer ear, and then off into the dark, another victory for Pura Vida.