Roast swan - legal in England for royalty and Cambridge dons but not for us mere mortals

Colonel Harland Sanders, I read recently, got his catering start in Kentucky with a little café he named Indiana Cooked Goose & Broasted Swan. Not a great success apparently but if first you don't succeed ... Strange though that we don't see swan on menus as we do chicken. I mean, it is a bird and a big one at that with meat described by one chef who has eaten it as "deep red, lean, lightly gamey, moist, and succulent."
"I have a lot of friends in Michigan who hunt, and we once ate a swan at Christmas nine or ten years ago,” Mario Batali, told Esquire's Eat Like a Man blog back in 2011. The same blog had Cathy Kaufman, who teaches culinary history at the Institute of Culinary Education, noting that "menus from the medieval period were replete with game birds such as swans, herons, and peacocks. They were food for the elite, prized for their beauty and seeming nobility, but fell out of favor in the 15th and 16th centuries. The culprit was the turkey, a more flavorful, tender bird."
Helped in Britain at least by the fact that Swans have been the property of the Crown since around the twelfth century, with Edward IV’s Act Concerning Swans in 1482 clearly defining that ownership.

Often served at feasts, roast swan was a favored dish in the courts of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, particularly when skinned and redressed in its feathers and served with a yellow pepper sauce; others preferred to stuff the bird with a series of increasingly smaller birds, in the style of a turducken.
An article in Modern Farmer this month updates the royal prerogative:

To this day, Queen Elizabeth II participates in the yearly Swan Upping, in which the royal Swan Master counts and marks swans on the Thames, and the kidnapping and eating of swans can be considered a treasonous crime. Great Britain’s royals are still allowed to eat swan, as are the fellows of St. John’s College of Cambridge, but to the best of our knowledge, they no longer do. Thanks to stories like Leda and the Swan and Lohengrin, the birds appear almost mythical; a restaurant on the Baltic island of Ruegen had swan on their menu for a short time, before protests began and it was swiftly removed.

In the United States the Colonel Sanders experiment might be on the verge of being repeated.

In Michigan, however, which has the highest population of mute swans in North America, the creatures are considered pests. According to the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, the statewide breeding population increased from about 5,700 to more than 15,000 in just ten years. The birds attack people in the water and on shore, particularly children that wander too close to their nests.
In Michigan, mute swans threaten other native birds, such as common loons, black terns, and trumpeter swans, and are also destroying the wetlands where they live. The DNR has set a controversial plan to reduce the population to less than 2,000 by 2030 that involves issuing permits to remove mute swans and their nests from approved properties; a hunting season is not under consideration.

But someone must be doing a bit of swan hunting as in New York you can buy one if you have a spare thousand.