Well, I've just been reading postings over on the "predators and pests" section and I believe my hair has turned a bit grayer...
Here's the thing..folks spend lots of time and effort building their coops and runs...and caring for their babies. Maybe they go for the poultry wire or plastic stuff as the covering because it's less expensive. Maybe because that's what they've always seen coops covered with.
Things go along fine for a while...and then, one day, disaster. Doesn't have to be a coon; might be a stray dog or a cat...or those hawks or owls you mention you have around. Something tears through the wire, damages or destroys the birds...and you're back to square one. Gotta rebuild the run and start off with new stock. It would be very disheartening to have to do that.
Can we cover "all bases" in terms of predators? Nope. But we can try to build the most secure run the first time around and then stand back and say we've done our best.
For what it's worth, I live in the city and even here we've got coons (one year we trapped over a dozen trying to save some exotic bulbs we purchased), possums, snakes, stray cats...even a fox. We have a family of owls that raise babies nearby and we'll frequently see them during daylight hours. One year we had a pair of hawks building a nest in one of our huge backyard pine trees (and I came home from work one afternoon and saw one of the hawks sitting in a tree across the street, calmly eating a squirrel it had caught while tenants living in the apartments came and went, never noticing this fellow a dozen feet from them).
So predators can be out during daylight hours (like you, my chickens are locked in the coop each night.
Gail
