March 23, 2018 — The 700-pound sea lion blinked in the sun, sniffed the sea air and then lazily shifted to the edge of the truck bed and plopped onto the beach below.

Freed from the cage that carried him to the ocean, the massive marine mammal shuffled into the surf, looked left, looked right and then started swimming north as a collective groan went up from wildlife officials who watched from the shore.

After two days spent trapping and relocating the animal designated #U253, he was headed back to where he started — an Oregon river 130 miles (209 kilometers) from the Pacific Ocean that has become an all-you-can-eat fish buffet for hungry sea lions.

“I think he’s saying, ‘Ah, crap! I’ve got to swim all the way back?'” said Bryan Wright, an Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife scientist.

It’s a frustrating dance between California sea lions and Oregon wildlife managers that’s become all too familiar in recent months. The state is trying to evict dozens of the federally protected animals from an inland river where they feast on salmon and steelhead that are listed under the Endangered Species Act.

The bizarre survival war has intensified recently as the sea lion population rebounds and fish populations decline in the Pacific Northwest.

The sea lions breed each summer off Southern California and northern Mexico, then the males cruise up the Pacific Coast to forage. Hunted for their thick fur, the mammals’ numbers dropped dramatically but have rebounded from 30,000 in the late 1960s to about 300,000 today due to the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at ABC News