WASHINGTON— They swipe, tap and scroll with ease.

Orangutans at the National Zoo have mastered the iPad so well, in fact, that they’ve developed favorite apps.

Kyle, a 16-year-old male, opts for hitting notes on the piano app while glancing around his environment, hay dangling out of his mouth.

Bonnie, a 36-year-old female, pokes at cymbals on the drum app. Iris, who’s 25, stares wide-eyed at the calm koi pond app.

The National Zoo is the 13th zoo worldwide to join Apps for Apes, started by the larger nonprofit organization Orangutan Outreach to raise awareness of orangutans’ endangerment.

Orangutans are native to the tropical rain forests of Indonesia, which has seen deforestation increase over the last 70 years. Some experts fear that the large apes might be extinct in 10 years.

“The situation in the wild is brutal,” said Richard Zimmerman, founder and director of New York-based Orangutan Outreach. “That’s their home. They need that forest to live in.”

Zimmerman hopes that the unconventional nature of orangutans using iPads will help attract more attention to his group’s cause.

The program, which began in 2011, sends donations to the Apps for Apes program directly to conservation efforts, unless they’re specifically marked otherwise.

Becky Malinsky, a National Zoo animal keeper, said the orangutans had performed particularly well with the transition to the iPad since the zoo had used touch-screen computers for the last 20 years.

What did take a bit of time, she said, was transitioning from the techniques used with touch-screen computers to that of the iPad.

Orangutans can’t use their fingernails to navigate the iPad as they could with the computers; they had to learn to develop pressure on the pads of their fingers for scrolling and swiping.

• Associated Press