On Mon, 19 May 2014 12:29:10 -0700 (PDT), Dom
wrote:

Is this something I should worry about? When the nights are cold, the hardwood floor, especially on the second floor, start to POP like a shot gun. Maybe 5 pops during the course of the night. I've had the floors installed since 2009, no noise since then, just this year. Is there something I can do to stop it?

The workers who did your floor may have accidentally enclosed cicada
pupae in your floor, and now they have matured enough to want out.

Specifically, I would suspect the "five-year gunslinger cicada". It has
some unusual organ on its side which not only sounds like a gun, and
looks like a gun, it shoots like a gun, and is used by them to kill
other cicadas that are looking to mate. They have even been known to
shoot a male in the process of mating, and then take up where the
now-dead cicada left off. The female seems not to notice the
difference. If you could get video of this, I know you could sell it,
but you'd need to pry up a lot of the boards, use ultra-violet light and
ultra-violet film. And find out the proper way to open the floor,
because if you do it wrong, they'll hide for weeks.

Hmm. They've been trying to get pictures of this since long before film
was less popular, so if you only use digital, you'll need a camera that
is ultra-violet responsive (UVR) . (If you use plain old white light,
the cicadas will freeze and appear to be wood shavings. )

It's been said that the female cicadas poison the other females in order
to have the choice of males, but this may be an insect legend.

That's all I remember, but I see that if you google gunslinger cicada
there is plenty of info, including on movie-making. That's what you
should do first.