That's it!!! Thank you so much. It's bothered me for 2 yrs and you solved it overnight. Awesome!

Thank you! Had to be a bird because I haven't seen one of these trees anywhere nearby.

Looks exactly what I just pulled up from my yard. It was a volunteer also. From another post here, I gathered it was poke salad plant. Once I pulled it up, I was surprised to see a pretty thick root. Let's see if it comes back.

Yes, they can get very large, but that is highly variable. Back when I was in school, forestry prof told us there was one and only one county in the entire USA where black cherry was a commercial timber crop, that being somewhere in PA. I have no idea if that is still the case, but the point is, this species grows across a wide geographic range, but results in terms of tree performance vary greatly. In my "near-north" Wisconsin swampy woods, I've got a few BC's but they'll never amount to anything. I suspect the wetness of the site combined with a possible "frost pocket" regime may be keeping them somewhat stunted and disease-prone. On the other hand, going back to that professor, he would take us to a woods for tree ID work and there was one truly enormous BC that nobody ever got right, it being so very large that at ground level, one could make out no details of leaf or twig, nor did the trunk look anything like what you'd expect of this species at that size and age class-none of the platey arrangements to be seen anymore on this monster. I'll bet that one was pushing 90 or more feet in height. +oM