This study was undertaken to examine the changes in the feeding station (FS) behaviour of sheep during the grazing down of swards, and the effect of the phenological stage of grass on grazing within and moving between FSs. Two cocksfoot sward structures, vegetative and reproductive, were compared under rotational grazing of 0.12-ha paddocks by 11 dry ewes with 4 studied in detail. We determined the changes in FS behaviour with resource depletion and tested the hypothesis that selective grazing on a `heterogeneous' reproductive sward, compared to a `homogeneous' vegetative sward, increased foraging costs, in both bite selection within the station and FS selection within the paddock. On both swards, ewes adjusted their foraging behaviour to resource depletion by decreasing the time spent grazing and the number of bites per FS. They also reduced the time spent moving between FSs, as a result of fewer steps taken and a higher walking speed, and grazed longer per day. For a given green leaf mass, selectivity was increased on reproductive compared to vegetative sward, between FSs (longer distance walked to select a new FS) and within FSs (fewer bites taken for a given FS grazing time). The ewes partly compensated for the extra time costs due to selective grazing by walking faster between FSs and grazing longer per day.