When the Murray Sunset National Park was proclaimed 21 years ago it was little more than a dust bowl.

Today visitors are treated to a display of yellow, pink and red wild flowers.

Ranger Kym Schramm says before it was proclaimed a national park, this area of 677 hectares in north west Victoria's Mallee region was severely overgrazed by domestic livestock and feral animals.

While removing sheep and cattle was straightforward, controlling goats and rabbits was a daunting task.

"Over the last 10 years we've taken out nearly 6,000 goats from the landscape and as a result of that we have seen significant changes in vegetation", says Kym Schramm.

Brendan Rogers, who runs a federal Biodiversity Fund program in the park, says over a decade members of sporting shooters associations in Nhill and Mildura devoted many weekends to goat culling.

"Our aim was to lower their numbers significantly enough so we can get regeneration of the landscape."

An aerial survey earlier this year indentified 8,000 goats still in the park, and Brendan Rogers says a long term strategy is still required to control them.

As well as goat shooting, there was the task of eliminating hundreds of thousands of rabbits.

Burrows and warrens were ripped with tractors and fumigated. While a ground survey ten years ago spotted 340 rabbits along a one kilometre stretch of track, that is now down to less than one per linear kilometre.

"If we find a hot spot where rabbit numbers are high we focus on that area until rabbit numbers are down", says Kim Schramm.

He while says vegetation is slowly returning, the park is missing a generation of trees.

"Beforehand the area was grazed very heavily for 60, 80 years. As a result of that grazing, no shrubs or plants came up from seed drop or very rarely and the seed from those emerging plants never got the chance to get going either."

He says a sign of success will be more hollow logs, which are produced by older trees and are essential to the ecosystem.

"Particularly the native pine once it reaches a certain age starts to drop limbs off and those limb joints for hollows in the trees and those hollows provide nesting areas for the Major Mitchell cockatoos which is a rare and threatened species in the Mallee."

Brendan Rodgers says his teams have been giving nature a helping hand by planting native trees such as buloke and cypress pines in two different locations - Pine Plain and Ned's Corner.

And he says while goat numbers are down to just a few thousand, the fight against goats will never let up.

His team have recently put satellite tracking collars on 15 goats to glean information on how goats move around and what habitats they prefer.

Kym Schramm, ranger in charge of the Murray Sunset National Park

Brendan Rodgers, runs a federally funded Parks Victoria project within the park

Producer: Belinda Tromp