MOST NATURE BOOKS these days are heavy reading — heavy on the kitchen scales, if not on the intellect. They consist mainly of superb photographs on weighty, glossy paper, with an entertaining text cobbled around them.

No frogs anywhere weigh as much as Frogs by Paul Starosta and Teddy Moncuit (Natural Wonders Press, £27.50/offer £24.75). But in these wonderful pictures, some look as if they might, since the bouncy amphibians are enlarged till their cold, lustrous eyes are bigger than £2 coins. A monstrous, chilling book.

Butterflies get similar blow-up treatment in Butterflies of the World by Gilles Martin and Myriam Baran (Abrams, £24.95/£22.45), a parade of ravishingly coloured, fragile wings, and some pugnacious caterpillars with horns like hawthorn twigs.

Such magnifications are not possible in Elephant! by Steve Bloom (Thames & Hudson, £24.95/£22.45). Instead we get close-ups of tarry skin interleaved with poetical, long-distance shots of great trunks and behinds.

Rainforest by Thomas Marent (Dorling Kindersley, £25/23) is a “photographic journey” through some of the hotter places of the earth. We are assured that “no wood from rainforest areas was used in the manufacture of this book” — only from European forests. The World of the Polar Bear by Norbert Rosing (A&C Black, £29.99/£26.99) covers not only the bears enjoying the snow, but also the walruses and arctic foxes around them.

White Nature by Vincent Munier (Natural Wonders Press, £25/£23) is another portrait of animals and birds among snow and ice, virtually wordless, but with the snowflakes almost blowing off the page.

After all these wide spaces, it is restful to come back to the world of fine detail. Serious visitors to the snow will be glad to have A Complete Guide to Arctic Wildlife by Richard Sale (Helm, £40/£36), which is richly informative about the ways and whereabouts of every creature from the Siberian tit to the snowshoe hare. It must be the only book with a map of the North Pole on almost every page.

Collins have a new field guide, Complete British Wild Flowers by Paul Sterry (£15.99/£14.39). It is well laid out, with good, clear photographs of the plants, and a short but useful gazetteer of places where some of the rarer flowers can be found.

Discover Butterflies in Britain by D. E. Newland (WildGuides, £19.95) is very helpful. First, it picks out, with maps, 66 places where it is particularly rewarding to look for butterflies (throwing in one in the Netherlands, where large copper butterflies, now extinct in Britain, can be seen). Then it reverses the procedure, going through British butterflies one by one with descriptions, and noting the “hotspots” for them.

There is a new and updated edition of the RSPB Handbook of British Birds, by Peter Holden and Tim Cleeves (Helm, £9.99/£9.49). Many bird guides now offer only information on how to identify birds, but this also gives concise accounts of all the other aspects of their lives.

There is also a new edition of a huge work, The Encyclopaedia of Mammals, edited by David W. Macdonald (Oxford, £35/£31.50). Experts systematically survey all known species of mammal, but this is in no way a dry work, with many fascinating accounts of such creatures as the strange, snouted solenodons of Cuba, and the gazelle-like pronghorns of North America.

However, perhaps the most remarkable of these more detailed works is Woodlands, by Oliver Rackham (Collins, £25/£22.50). Rackham has been a great champion in the campaign for real woods and against the endless postwar conifer plantations — a campaign now largely won. Here he is writing not as a conservationist, but simply to share his prodigious knowledge of woods and trees with the reader.

He writes about every kind of woodland, its history, how the trees grow, what other plants grow alongside them, how trees were used, even how wood used in furniture can be identified. On this point, he observes that “in England, chestnut is a phantom timber: I have yet to find any supposed ancient ‘chestnut’ that is not oak”. He notices that in a Constable painting of Salisbury cathedral, the magnificent elms are East Anglian elms, “not English elm, the common species around Salisbury”, and asks “Did Constable import them from an East Anglian sketchbook?” A complete and utterly absorbing compendium.

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy