Abstract: A corn harvester machine with an improved corn head for picking up downed cornstalks. The head has some conventional components including a cross auger conveyor with a forwardly open trough and a base portion extending forwardly and downwardly from it, pairs of horizontally spaced stripper plates with gathering chains and snapping rolls running above and below them and defining a plurality stalk-receiving throats. A lower cowl is fixedly mounted between each adjacent pair of stripper plates and a downwardly concave upper cowl is nested over each lower cowl and pivotally journaled to it for up and down tilting movement about a horizontal tilting axis at the cowl rear end portions. A pair of stalk lifting chains are trained for orbital movement between pairs of driving and idler sprockets. The driving sprockets are journaled in the lower cowl about the tilting axis. The idler sprockets are rotatably journaled in a front nose portion of the upper cowl and are vertically movable with it.