Cetawin made a cross country move with her birds from Oregon to KY awhile back and hasn't been able to get pens erected yet. She is working on the materials right now, but her DH isn't in town to help at the moment.
I have free ranged my flocks for five years in the mountains of N. GA, even had a fox den on my property at one point. We have every predator you can imagine, including coyotes, foxes, bears, weasels, possums, coons, bobcats, hawks, roaming dogs and probably even cougars if you believe eyewitness accounts. So far, probably due to my awesome roosters, we haven't lost any to predators yet. Though we have 2 of our over 5 acres perimeter fenced, livestock fencing won't keep reliably keep out most of those (well, probably any--just makes it harder for dogs to race across the place and grab a chicken as they go and keeps my birds on my property).
I don't intend to lock my birds in pens forever, even if we begin to have a predator loss here and there. To us, the benefits of a free range flock outweigh the risks. I didn't get chickens to keep them in pens as I feel that is not as healthy for them. We are home all the time they are out, however-they stay in the pens when we're gone, and we are in and out of the coops all day long as well, so there is a big human presence. That is not 100% safe, either, since the Cochin that the coyote took from Cetawin's flock waited and watched people milling around for a long time before she struck that day.