This is the stunning moment a pregnant Bengal tigress was filmed climbing out of a river and walking off into a forest.

The rare footage of the beast was recorded in the Sundarbans National Park in eastern India's state of West Bengal.

Tourists on a tiger safari spotted it in the river just before it clambered on to the riverbank and wandered off into the Pirkhali jungle.

The pregnant Bengal tigress emerges from the river in Sundarbans National Park

Former forest official Naveen Chandra Bahuguna said that the tigress was pregnant.

The Bengal tiger is found primarily in India with smaller populations in Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, China and Myanmar.

It is the most numerous of all tiger sub-species with more than 2,500 left in the wild but is classed as endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List.

The creation of India’s tiger reserves in the 1970s helped to stabilise numbers, but poaching to meet a growing demand from Asia has once again put the big cat at risk.