I bought a dozen chicks last spring. The sign on them at the store said all hens so I didn't even bother to check. One turned out to be a rooster. Before the end of the year all the hens had been taken by predators and the rooster was the only one left. Not a scratch on him. I used chickens for bug and rodent control as we've renovated an abandoned crack house that had been almost reclaimed by the forest. We gutted it to the studs, it's basically a brand new house, but the contents of the original house had been strewn throughout the property. Water heaters, refrigerators, junk cars, broken furniture, the contents of a kitchen, about 40 old bald tires. I swore they must have brought more junk to the site. Finally a neighbor told us the previous owners had bulldozed a fully furnished burned out mobile home in the backyard about 20 years ago. That junk fest prevented us from running a lawn mower for a whole year! We considered goats but were afraid goats would die from eating broken televisions, silverware, beer cans, carpets, and broken glass. All hidden under 7 foot tall weeds. We chose chickens to clear away the weeds and snakes so we could get to the debris. Well, long story short, we've cleaned up the trash enough to go barefoot, but we've actually given up free ranging hens. Now we've only got roosters. They've moved on from cleaning the yard to cleaning up pasture. Fenced because they are MEAN! Pity the little hawk that tries to mess with one of these monsters. We can only free range hens with a net over their heads.
Some males will and some won't. I had a GHO (owl) get into one of my coops. It killed some birds. My male must have fought with it because he and the hens that were left were quite bloody and freaked out. I moved them to another coop but it took some time for them to calm down. I covered my pens after that with some good heavy duty netting. At that time I had fishing lines over the pen but the owl managed to get through. Good luck...
My brother went through a similar ordeal. He had a farm and divided the property unto two parcels. One had a barn on it with a mobile home. He built a house on the other part and they lived in the house for a couple of years then sold it and bought another house and remodeled it and lived in it for a couple of years. They have horses so they boarded the horses but also decided to look for another place so they could have the horses back on their property. They bought another farm in the winter so there was plenty of snow. In the spring when the snow melted there was trash and junk everywhere. They did eventually clean up everything. They didn't want to bring the horses over until they had cleaned the stuff up. Good luck...
