Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

After today's puzzle, a challenge was given to come up with a series of more than four words in a category, the first two letters of each of which are the last two of the one preceding it. Being an ornithologist, I naturally gravitated towards birds and easily came up with a series of 17: accentor, oriole, leaf-love, velvetbreast, starthroat, attila, lammergeier, eremomela, laughingthrush, shama, magpie-robin, inca, cachalote, teal, alethe, helmetcrest, stonechat. Note that these are just the last words of common names, mostly not full names. Giving more thought to it unquestionably could produce a longer list, given that there are somewhere between 400 and 500 such names from which to choose. Granted, most of these names are not familiar to the general public, so maybe this exercise will expand some non-birders' vocabularies. I imagine there are many other categories that could produce similarly long series.