This is the heartwarming moment a newborn elephant stranded in a pond was reunited with its mother.

The female calf, believed to be just 10 days old, had wandered away from her herd when she tumbled into a 25ft-deep reservoir in Chanthaburi, Thailand.

Villagers working in a nearby longan orchard heard the baby pachyderm's desperate cries at around 10 am on Sunday, June 22.

They called a wildlife rescue team, which found the small creature struggling in the muddy pool.

Dramatic footage shows officers and volunteers forming a human chain to hoist the elephant calf up the muddy slope.

Onlookers cheered as the rescue team battled to pull the small but hefty newborn to safety.

Kongkiat Temtamnan, director of the Protected Area Office Region 2, said: 'The operation was quite difficult because the mother elephant and the herd kept trying to charge at us. We had to wait until another team signalled that the herd had moved away from the pond before we could act.

'One rescuer went down the pond with a rope, and together we managed to lift the baby elephant out. In no time, it was on its feet and walked straight back to its mother waiting nearby. We felt relief and gratitude that we were able to reunite them. It was quite an emotional moment.'

The mother and daughter were later seen on drone footage walking away together along a forest path.

Thailand has up to 3,500 elephants in the wild. The population has been increasing in recent years, but it is still a fraction of the estimated 300,000 wild elephants that lived in the country at the beginning of the 20th century.

The main threats to wild elephants in Thailand are habitat loss and fragmentation, poaching, and conflict with humans.