Black Willow

Due to the growing difficulty in identifying the currently blooming flowers I've been looking more closely at trees. Early fall is an excellent time to identify trees, most of them have fruit and some of the leaves are changing color so you have both colors at your disposal.
May I present you with the Black Willow. It has a fairly wide range, from southern Canada to Texas, though is most commonly reported (according to USDA's website) south and east of the Great Lakes.
Black willows commonly grow to 50 feet, but can get up to 100, and although the trunks can reach 3 feet in diameter I have yet to see one with a 2 foot diameter trunk. They can have either singular or multiple trunks and have light grey-to-black bark with a slight reddishness to it. The bark peels back giving the tree a hairy or shaggy appearance. The branches grow upwards giving the tree a spear-like shape, but this is nicely offset by it's drooping willow leaves.
The leaves are long (to 6 inches) and thin (no more than .75 inches) with fine serrations and relatively short petioles*. They're simple and alternate and turn the most beautiful light gold in fall. The flowers show up in spring as a short catkin of non-descript kinda yellowish color.
Being a willow this tree needs abundant water, so it can be frequently see in ditches, dry riverbeds, and by lakes and rivers.
It's a fairly flimsy looking tree with thin branches and wispy bark, and true to its appearance its wood is very light and not good for building. The wood is good for making charcoal and it's light weight made it excellent for the manufacturing of wooden limbs. The shallowly thick root system also help in the prevention of erosion. Something especially cool is that willow bark has salicylic acid in it (the active ingredient of aspirin) and it used to be chewed as a headache reliever.

Two ways to tell it apart from the weeping willows are these:
Black willow - upward pointing branches, reddish branches.
Weeping willow - downward branches, yellowish branches.

*I know I mentioned this word before, the leaf's stalk, but today I found it's pronounced "petty-OLE" not "peh-TOH-lee." I'm not sure whether to blame this phonics failure on failure, dyslexia, or German double vowel pronunciation.