Nicole Navarro: Steward of the Keys Through Rescue, Recovery and Reef
Nicole Navarro, the executive director of Key Largo fox rescue Pawsitive Beginnings, which also serves as an educational and healing organization for humans, didn't plan to become a fox rescuer. She didn't plan to create a nonprofit or launch a social media presence that would introduce hundreds of thousands of people around the world to the Florida Keys, or to build a therapeutic program that brings abused women and traumatized children face-to-face with animals who understand survival. Most of it, she'll tell you, just happened. One unexpected connection at a time.
The thread that would eventually lead Navarro to fox rescue began with Hurricane Irma in 2017. After the storm she reached out to Jeanne Selander who runs the Monroe County Sheriff’s Animal Farm at the county jail to find out if she needed help and the answer was, “yes.”
An introduction to foxes
Navarro spent time volunteering at the farm, and the two women formed a close bond over their shared love of animals. In 2018, two foxes were surrendered to Selander from a private home in Key Largo, one rescued from a fur farm, the other a former exotic pet. It was Navarro's first up-close experience with foxes, and she was transfixed.
“I became fascinated by them. By their stories and by the way they are.”
Foxes, she learned, have zero instinct to please people. Unlike dogs, they don't soften easily to human presence. Rescue isn't a fairy tale for them. So, Navarro did something simple and radical: she sat with them. She didn't push limits or try to force connection. She just showed up, day after day, and respected their boundaries. Eventually, they let her in.
That experience of earning trust slowly, patiently, and on the animal's terms, would become the philosophical foundation of everything Pawsitive Beginnings would become.
A chance to help rescue foxes from a fur farm in Iowa came in 2018. She said yes. That rescue — four adult foxes brought to Key Largo — became the founding act of Pawsitive Beginnings. The nonprofit sanctuary now provides lifelong refuge for foxes who could never survive in the wild, many of them bearing the physical and psychological scars of the fur trade.
Healing journeys for foxes and the humans who identify with them
The most profound and unexpected chapter of Pawsitive Beginnings began when Navarro started sharing her sanctuary with people who were healing from trauma of their own.
The connection to Kinder in the Keys, a residential treatment facility for women in recovery, came naturally. Navarro began bringing women from the program to Pawsitive Beginnings, where they could spend time with the foxes and hear their stories about being rescued from fur farms, where they were bred in confined conditions and often suffered physical and psychological harm. Survivors meeting survivors.
"The parallels between the foxes' journeys and their own journeys aren't lost on anyone," Navarro said. "These animals came from abuse. They had to learn how to trust again, how to find safety, how to heal. The women in recovery see themselves in that story."
The program expanded to include the Florida Keys Children's Shelter after a visit in 2023 that Navarro still describes with quiet emotion. A traumatized young girl was brought to the sanctuary, where she encountered a baby fox named Ridley. Something shifted. The girl, who had been closed off and unreachable, opened up.
A new kind of Reef in the Keys
Of all the residents of Pawsitive Beginnings, none has captured the Keys' heart quite like Reef. He’s a red fox whose personality, Navarro says, is impossible to ignore. In 2021 she introduced Upper Keys Weekly editor Jim McCarthy to Reef, a newly arrived baby fox who had joined the sanctuary.
In 2021, when Navarro approached McCarthy with the idea of Reef “penning” a regular column in the paper, he said yes, and Reef’s byline has appeared in the paper ever since, offering a fox’s eye-view of life in the Upper Keys.
The community embraced it, and Reef the Fox won Best Local Celebrity in the annual Best of the Upper Keys Awards for four consecutive years.
Nicole Navarro
When did you first come to the Keys and why?
I first came to the Keys as a little girl, tagging along on dive trips organized by my mother's Pittsburgh-based scuba certification business. My mother moved to Key Largo full-time in 1993. After I graduated high school and college back in Pennsylvania, I came down to visit in 2004 and never left.
I spent nearly eight years working aboard the Key Largo Princess, the glass-bottom boat operating out of the Holiday Inn, educating visitors about the coral reef and the fragile ecosystem beneath it. A lot of people who come here had never even seen the ocean and being able to provide that experience of educating people about the reef and what they can do to protect it was truly amazing.
What aspects of the Keys way of life matter most to you?
The sense of community here is unlike anything I've experienced anywhere else. It's hard to put into words. I'm an introvert, honestly, but even I feel connected here. People check on you, they show up for you. It's like Whoville. Across all the islands, there's this warmth and this genuine care for one another. It's not performative. It's just how people are here.
How do you personally work to "connect and protect" the Keys' unique way of life and environment?
The foxes connected me to something I didn't expect. There's this philosophy, and I really believe it, that people protect what they love, and they love what they have a personal connection to. For years, working on the glass-bottom boat, I tried to create that connection for visitors. Now, through the foxes and the social media presence we've built, I find myself doing it on a global scale for the Florida Keys. People who never knew this place existed now know about our reef, our community, our way of life. That's a gift I didn't see coming.
What do you hope your humanitarian and animal rescue actions will help accomplish?
Hope. That's the word I keep coming back to. Whether it's a fox who came from a fur farm or a woman in recovery or a child who's been through trauma, hope is the thing. I want people to know that where you start is not where you have to end up. And I want the foxes to have the peaceful, loved life they deserve. They've earned it.
What's your favorite way to connect with the Keys when you have some rare downtime?
I love visiting the Florida Keys Wild Bird Center’s sanctuary and boardwalk in Tavernier. I have a deep appreciation for what wildlife rehabilitation organizations do. They give injured and suffering animals a second chance, which is exactly what we're trying to do at Pawsitive Beginnings. The Keys have such incredible native wildlife, and the people who work to protect it matter so much. Any chance I get to support that, I do.
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