A newborn baby girl was abandoned on the roadside and found alive by a passerby who heard the infant's cries.

American expat Eric Ransdell was walking home when he heard the baby crying from a pile of rubbish near his flat in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

He searched the area and discovered the girl - who was just hours old and still had her umbilical cord attached - covered with a black and red cotton blanket next to old tyres.

The child was rushed to a hospital where she was admitted to intensive care and is now recovering while police try to identify her mother.

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Eric, who has visited the girl in the hospital after finding her last Thursday, said she is a "very lucky baby".

He feared the infant was dead when he first saw her arm sticking out of the blanket.

Eric said he checked her pulse and then alerted friends, who called the police and rescue workers.

After visiting the baby at Nakornping Hospital, he added: "The baby is in the infants' ICU and doing well.

"They have her on antibiotics as a preventive measure for the next five to seven days, but other than that they say she is healthy.

"They still don't know her exact age, though the head ICU nurse told me she's fairly certain she was either a newborn or less than 48 hours old.

"I then met with a woman from social services who told me that once she is discharged from ICU, she will go to an infants care facility next to the hospital for three to four weeks.

"After that there is a home for infants run by the government where she will stay while the police try to locate the mother."

Locals suggested it could be difficult to find the person or people who dumped the baby in the residential area.

A street food seller who works nearby said: "This is a residential area where there are lots of different groups of people.

"It has been more quiet recently due to the pandemic so I think there might not have been anybody around to witness the cruel person who did this."

Police said the search will be difficult because most of the nearby buildings are private property.

Lieutenant Thanchanok Phromraj said: "Almost every CCTV camera in the area belongs to condominium blocks, which will take longer for us to access to them all.

"We suspect that the mother's incentive to leave her baby might be that she is in poverty and struggling to pay her bills due to the pandemic or it was an unexpected baby and she did not want anybody to know."